


on the health benefits of dying young and beautiful

by Welcoming_Disaster



Category: Captain America (Comics), Iron Man (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Fashion Designer Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Inaccurate portrayals of boats and boat related action, Injury, Kidnapping, M/M, Mystery, Private Investigator Steve Rogers, Private Investigators, everyone is an asshole because it's ults, holy shit what's happened to Tony?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27113933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welcoming_Disaster/pseuds/Welcoming_Disaster
Summary: PI Steve Rogers is hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of fashion designer Antonio Stark.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 55
Kudos: 113





	1. howard stark

It was noon, and the day was postcard perfect. Sunlight fell in slivers over Steve’s desk, forming neat, perfect squares over his notebook. Birds chirped outside the window. Occasionally, they would quiet, and human voices, laughing and talking, would fill the air, workers from the offices around them returning from their lunch breaks. The breeze was gentle, the yellowing leaves outside fluttering. The last butterflies of the season danced and fluttered outside, careful of the birds.

Bucky was humming, cheerfully, as he click-clacked away on the keyboard at their front desk, clearly audible even through the half-closed door. Steve wanted to kill him.

Gail was out. It would have been a relief had Steve not known she’d be back with in a half an hour carrying two takeout bags and eat at Bucky’s desk, laughing and talking. Instead, it turned into a cold, malicious sort of dread.

They tried to be polite about it, he knew, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be any more appreciative than he would have been had Bucky marched in with cake, party horns, and a huge banner bearing the words “I’m sleeping with your ex.” Hell, at least then someone would have gotten _him_ food for a change.

The phone rang, the ringtone as annoyingly cheerful as Bucky’s voice when he answered, “Rogers & Richards Detective Agency, James speaking.”

Steve scowled back down at his papers, tuning him out as the call continued. _James,_ his ass. Who did he think he was?

The door to his office opened two minutes later. In an effort to act busy, Steve picked up a photograph on his desk — the wife of a client, getting into another man’s car, which, frankly, was fitting — and stared at it as though divining answers.

“You have a one o’clock today,” Bucky told him.

Steve scowled at the empty hour on his planner. “No, I don’t.”

Bucky shrugged. “You do now. Some client just called.”

“You should have asked.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, his thin patience threatening to give way to something that could have been either amusement or anger, “you hire me to do secretary work, I’m gonna do secretary work, dude. You got an appointment at one and you’re gonna suck it up.”

He shut the door. Steve resisted the urge to flip off the doorway where he’d stood.

He realized only after Bucky had been gone for a good two minutes that he welcomed the news. Despite the fact that Rogers & Richards were well-established, amount of business they had at any given time was completely unpredictable; they’d be swamped one day and bored the next. What Steve needed, really, was to throw himself back into work. The chances were he’d be dealing with another infidelity case — their most frequent clients tended to be of that variety — and someone else’s troubles never failed to distract Steve from his own.

He caught his own reflection in the dark monitor of his computer, and took a moment to make sure he was presentable, straightening his tie (done in the pattern of the American flag, his favorite), and running a hand over his spiky, buzzcut hair. Frowning at his own reflection, he felt satisfied that he looked exactly the same as he always did; patriotic, muscular, business casual and slightly intimidating.

His one o’clock arrived eight minutes late. Considering he’d called to schedule only an hour before the appointment itself, Steve wasn’t surprised.

It was a man, likely somewhere between his late sixties and early seventies. Steve, who knew as little about clothing as he could get away with, could still tell immediately that the suit he was wearing was expensive. He was balding, with a prominent widow’s peak. His face, which had once clearly been handsome, looked heavy, almost beat-up, pulled down by deep frown lines and grayish purple crow’s feet.

Steve stood, smiling tightly at his new client, and held out a hand, “Good afternoon. I’m Steve Rogers.”

“Howard Stark.” The name was vaguely familiar.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Stark. You can have a seat on the chair across from mine, if you’d like.” Both men sat. “What is it that brings you here today?”

“It’s my son, Antonio.” Howard Stark said, without preamble, “he disappeared five weeks ago, and the police have been utterly useless.”

Steve reached for his notebook, pushing aside something that could have been excitement. He would never wish ill on anyone, of course, but he couldn’t lie. A proper case, a break from the monotony of divorce, infidelity, finance cases of the past few months, was tempting.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Stark,” he said, earnestly, “why don’t you tell me more and I’ll let you know what I can do for you. When did this happen, the exact date?”

“September 14th, around the evening,” Stark told him, “though his butler didn’t contact me until the evening of the 15th.”

Yep, rich. “I see. What was the last time you had seen your son, Mr. Stark?”

“August 31st, on my birthday. He went down to visit me. It was our first time seeing each other in nearly fifteen years. We didn’t have an easy relationship, but we were working towards a conciliation.”

Steve made a note in the his notebook, and tapped the eraser side of his pencil lightly against the table. “But his butler still called you?”

“My son didn’t exactly have a lot of close friends,” Stark said, with a shrug, “next of kin was the logical option. Besides, he had once worked for me. There’s old loyalty, there.”

“Alright. And you said the police investigated?”

“Not well. He’d planned to go swimming in the evening. The tides were horrible on the 14th, later, it had stormed all night. Swimwear was missing from his things. His car had been found by the beach. The official police theory had been an accidental drowning.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No. My son is a terrible swimmer, but he isn’t stupid. I’ve never known him to be willing get into anything but a jacuzzi.”

“Alright,” said Steve, again. “Let’s start at the beginning. Where did your son live? What did he do for a living?”

Over the next half an hour, Stark sketched out to him a complicated family history that Steve felt he was only getting a small fraction of. Stark himself ran a technology company, which appeared to have made him a good deal of money. A widower of many years, he had had two children, twins, Greg and Antonio. The elder, Greg, seemed to have been in favor with his father until recently, when he’d been suddenly and dramatically cut out of company for reasons Stark did not elaborate on. The missing son, Antonio, seemed to have broken off from the family business before he’d even turned eighteen. To his father’s clear, uncontained disapproval, he had chosen to major in fashion design, and apparently done very, very well for himself in the industry. Steve, unsure of exactly which Stark it was whose name he had recognized, endeavored to ask Gail if she had ever heard of the designer.

Howard Stark’s company was based in Silicon Valley. He’d chosen to hire a New York private detective because his son had lived in New York, where he owned an apartment by his office in Hudson Square.

“Did he live alone?” Steve asked.

“As far as I’m aware, yes. Jarvis — his butler — stopped by every day to organize his affairs but lived separately from him. He had had a live-in fiancée, but, according to Jarvis, they broke up several months ago.”

“Alright. And the last time he had been seen?”

“He met with a friend for lunch on the last day.”

“Can you give me the name of that friend?”

“I can.”

“And the butler?”

“Yes.”

Steve took down both names. Stark could only provide a number and address for the butler. The friend, a fellow named Thorlief Golmen, apparently disliked Antonio’s family and refused to speak to the father. Stark, however, had been sure that Golmen would speak to Steve as long as he didn’t know who hired him.

“The police barely interviewed Golmen,” Howard Stark told Steve, “they took him at his word. I was able to get criminal records, though, and he was sighted on CCTV footage attempting to come into Antonio’s apartment a week after he disappeared.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve got the recording; you can look through it. His brother has a restraining order out on him. Golmen is a headcase with a criminal history and violent temper, involved in several extremist political movements.”

“Do you know which movements, exactly?”

“Anti War America. Green Fist Coalition. Operation: Communist.”

Steve jotted the names down dutifully. “Ah. Do you know the name of his ex fiancée?”

“Oh, was it…something Russian. Anastasia, I think, or Natalia. He said she was a model and that she baked on the side. Jarvis would know.”

Steve took a moment to think over the information provided to him, and then have a quick, sharp nod. “I can take a deposit and poke around. Conduct some preliminary interviews, let you know if I feel like there’s a case there.”

Unlike some clients, Stark had no issue putting down a deposit; Steve told him the amount, and he wrote out the check.

“I put together some information I thought was relevant,” he said, offering Steve a thick manilla folder. Steve thanked him, setting it aside to read after his client’s departure, and walked him past Bucky’s desk into the lobby.

By the time he retuned, Bucky was once again alone. The little trash can next to his desk was overfilled with styrofoam takeout containers, and the smell of Chinese food hung heavy in the air. Bucky’s camera was out on his desk, connected to the desktop computer, and Steve could see him editing pictures from a recent shoot.

In the interest of giving him something to do, he stopped by the desk.

“I’m gonna need you to call an Edwin Jarvis,” he informed Bucky, handing over the phone number Stark had given him, “See if he can meet me tomorrow. Tell him I’ve been hired by Howard Stark to investigate Antonio Stark’s disappearance.”

Bucky’s eyes went big, his mouth forming a little “o” shape. “You were what, now?”

“Hired by Howard Stark to investi—“

“Yeah, pal, I heard you the first time. We, uh, we thinking of the same Tony Stark, here?”

“Antonio,” Steve corrected, automatically, “he’s a fashion designer, I think.”

“Jesus, I knew you were out of touch, but. Seriously, Tony Stark? Not ringing a bell?”

Steve pulled up the spare chair in their small lobby, straddling it backwards. “No?”

“Oh, he was crazy. He was nuts. Remember the thing with Monica Chang’s dress on the red carpet last year, the whole tar and feather incident?”

“Uhh, kinda.”

“That was him. He’s well known for dressing the rich and famous up in God knows what and charging an arm and a leg for it.” Bucky shrugged, popping the gum Steve only now realized he was chewing, “Not to mention he’s slept with his way through most A-list actresses. And actors, I’m pretty sure.”

His eyes shot up to Steve on that last part, like he was expecting some kind of reaction. Steve shifted, uncomfortable at the sudden attention — what the hell did Bucky want, here,— and cleared his throat. “Y’know anything about the disappearance?”

“Uhh, yeah. He went swimming and never came back, I think. People were saying it was a publicity stunt for a while. Wasn’t there a funeral?”

Steve had no idea why Bucky expected him to know what. “Beats me. He’s been declared legally dead, then?”

“Think so.”

Steve made the mental note to check out the beneficiaries of the will. As rich as the family had been, it didn’t sound like Stark’s private fortune was anything to sneeze at.

“I’ll look him up,” he told Bucky, “see what I can find online.”

He turned back in the direction of the offices, heading back to his office just at the same time as Gail came out of hers. Her modest heels clicked against the linoleum floor. She was, as she generally tended to be, effortless beautiful, loose waves of red-brown hair near-glowing in the sunlight filtering through the windows. Steve’s eyes slid down her figure on their way to the floor, noting the way her sweater hugged her figure, the shape of her legs through the silky material of her trousers. He tried to convince himself that the the sharp pang in the pit of his stomach was desire.

“You’ll never believe this,” Bucky said, spinning around in his rolling chair to face her. “Stevie, tell ‘er what you’re working.”

Steve felt a familiar jolt of irritation at the childhood nickname, but, standing here in the room with both of them, both of them clearly trying to make their best of the situation, it was harder to sulk than in the confines of his office.

“Uh, missing’s person case,” he said, still staring off at the floor, “one Antonio Stark.”

“Reeaaally,” Gail said, her interest showing in her voice, “who’s hired us, a fan?”

“Family,” Bucky informed her, “Steve didn’t know to be suspicious, but I found a picture of the father online. Same man that came in here.”

“Steve didn’t know?” Gail asked, and Steve realized he couldn’t deal with the fond amusement in her voice.

“Steve didn’t know,” Steve snapped, irritable, as he stood.

“Honey, I didn’t mean like—“

The slam of Steve’s office door cut her off. He could imagine how, just outside the office, the two of them were probably grimacing at each other.

It didn’t matter. He had a case to focus on, didn’t he? He jabbed at the “on” button his desktop computer, scowling at it as it came alive, and found his way to Google. When he typed “Tony Stark” in the search bar, the first two suggestions were “Tony Stark sex tapes” and “Tony Stark death.”

The “images” tab of his search brought up mostly pictures of models in couture, their outfits angular and bright, perfectly geometric in a way that Steve found hard to look at. The first photograph of the man himself showed him at a high society party, his arms around two women at once, his head thrown back in laughter. He was handsome, his features sharp, pale blue eyes a stark contrast to his evenly tanned skin.His bright purple dress shirt was open at the front, revealing a faintly-defined six pack. The back of Steve’s neck colored just a little when he realized that he was also wearing one single, bright red feathered nipple tassel.

He found more details of the case online. As Howard Stark had told him, it had been ruled an accidental drowning after just over a three weeks of investigation. No body had ever surfaced. Fans online, like the family, had been suspicious of the verdict; #BoycottStarkFuneral had trended on Twitter three weeks ago.

The first social media accounts he could find for the man were through his brands, which had kept selling clothes after his disappearance. Steve scrolled through headscarves, lacy evening gloves, and dresses shaped like pillowcases to find their lackluster statements on Stark’s vanishing and best wishes to the family. The man himself had apparently only ever joined Instagram, and posted infrequently. Steve clicked through party photos and selfies with models, chasing any trace of the ex-fiancée, or of Golmen, the activist friend that Howard Stark had so disliked.

He found the fiancée in a post dated six months previously, in which Stark had taken a photograph of a woman’s hand. She had on an engagement ring with a huge, deep black stone set in diamonds around the edges. Steve thought it looked awful.

The photograph itself was captioned, “She said yes!! 🍾🎉 @RomNatash”

@RomNatash’s account private, though, judging by the 5,382,843 followers it had amassed, this was a recent development. Her bio read:

> “weird is good 👁️ nyc native 👁️ ask me about cake
> 
> Business inquiries: [natasharomanov2@umail.com](mailto:natasharomanov2@umail.com)”

Her avatar showed a redhead smiling coyly at the camera. Scowling at the strange world had had found himself in, Steve drafted an email and sent it.

As Steve followed link after link, trying to hunt down the ghost of truth behind Stark’s highly publicized life, the clock struck five. Bucky poked his head into the office to let him know he was clocking out. Gail followed shortly after, lingering a little too long in the doorway to Steve’s office like there was something she wanted to say.

In no hurry to return to his own empty apartment and Hungry Man dinners, Steve thumbed open the folder Howard Stark had given him, found the results of Thorlief Golmen’s background check inside, and began to read.


	2. edwin jarvis

Edwin Jarvis agreed to meet Steve at ten o’clock the next morning at Stark’s apartment. Steve arrived thirty minutes early and took a walk around the building. It was a commercial district, expensive, apartment buildings mingling with offices. Stark’s home and workplace were in the same building, a floor apart.

Steve stopped by the office. The lobby was spacious, with floor to ceiling windows and white walls, the only splotches of color coming from mustard yellow and ketchup red plush seats. The inner office, separated from the lobby by another white wall and door painted a black so dark that Steve fumbled to find the door handle, was locked. The plaque seemed to have recently been removed.

There was a small glass window in the top of the door, and Steve got on his tip toes to squint through it. A jolt of adrenaline hit him as he made out the scene inside; for a moment, he thought he was seeing the figure of a woman in white slumped against some piece of dark furniture. It hit him too late that he was only looking at a mannequin.

He would have to ask someone to let him look through the office later; with the lights off, he couldn’t make out much of anything inside. He checked his watch, and hurried for the elevator, unwilling to be late to a meeting with the butler.

When he knocked on the door of the apartment, the penthouse suite of the building, it was a short, chubby man who opened the door. He dressed in a grey suit, baggy around the elbows, and wore eyeglasses that sat too low on his nose. His double chin was so long and saggy that it faded seamlessly into his neck, giving him a turtle-like appearance.

Steve held out a hand. “Steve Rogers. Mr. Howard Stark has hired me to investigate your employer’s disappearance.”

“I’ve been informed, yes,” the man said, drily, “Edwin Jarvis. Can I get you anything to drink?”

“No, I’m alright.” Steve twirled around to look at the apartment the apartment, which as decorated in the same sparse, condiments on a paper plate style as the lobby, but much messier, “Have you been moving things around in here a lot? Cooking?”

Jarvis shrugged, “The police told me I was free to do so. The investigation is over, you see. The police were all over. The family came by to get things out of the safe. I only cleaned up.”

Steve glanced around again, paying particular attention to the clutter of papers on the glass coffee table, someone’s ballet shoes heaped on the violently turquoise couch, a clutter of yellow fabric and shoeboxes in the corner. “You cleaned up?”

“Master Tony didn’t make a habit of keeping his space neat, not when he was working.”

At Jarvis’s invitation, Steve took a seat on the uncluttered side of the couch. “Is that what he hired you for?”

“Among other things. I organized his apartment, his schedule, and his life. He was...” Jarvis hesitated, as though choosing the word, “… well intentioned, Master Tony, but he didn’t like to bog himself down with specifics of things.”

“I see. Mr. Stark told me you’d been working for the family for a long time?”

“Forty-eight years.”

Steve opened his notebook, making a little mark with his pencil. “So, you were employed about fifteen years before Antonio Stark was born?”

“That’s correct.”

“When’d you switch from Howard Stark’s employment to Antonio’s?”

“When he started earning enough to afford it, about five years ago.”

“Any particular reason you left?”

Jarvis paused, considering his words again. Steve thought he felt something uncomfortable in the man’s posture. His voice was icy when he spoke. “I liked Master Tony better than the rest of the family.”

“Any reason for that?”

The butler shrugged. “Treated the staff like they were human, I suppose. Easier man to work for; Mr. Howard Stark and Master Gregory have the tendency to demand perfection wherever they go.”

“Is that the reason Antonio broke away from the family?”

Again, Jarvis was silent for a beat too long. “I couldn’t tell you exactly why he left the family.”

“But if you had to guess?”

“Tony had never gotten along with his father. Too much… pressure. He’s wanted to leave the family company ever since he was young.”

“So it was gradual? Tony went in a different direction than his father and brother?”

“Is this relevant?”

“I’m just trying to get a background, Mr. Jarvis.”

The butler paused, selecting his words carefully. “I suppose there had been a fight. You have to understand, though, things had been… charged, in the family. Master Tony was in a… vulnerable emotional state, so to say.”

“When was this?”

“He had been sixteen when he left home. Accepted early to university.”

“Alright. And why was he upset, did you say?”

“I didn’t.” When the detective didn’t respond, though, Jarvis sighed and elaborated. “He had a girlfriend, back then. His father wasn’t a fan of the relationship. She’d come to visit Tony at his parents’ home, when they were supposed to be away. They returned early. When his father found out, he sent her straight back home. The plane crashed.”

Steve grimaced. One hell of a coincidence. “Whose plane was it?”

Jarvis shrugged. “I can’t say I recall.”

“Do you have a name for the girlfriend?”

“Josey. Josey Gardner, I believe.”

“So, Tony left home, and he never returned?”

“He returned this summer to celebrate his father’s seventieth birthday.”

“Why? What changed between them?”

“I don’t know.”

“No clue at all? Your employer didn’t tell you anything? His father didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Rogers.”

“Alright. How about his brother, were they close?”

“No. I don’t believe they talked.”

“Any reason why?”

Once more, Jarvis paused. Each of his words had a calculated quality to it. “An incongruence in personality, I suppose. The twins never… understood each other.”

“No big fights?”

“No.”

“Was Tony a rich man, Mr. Jarvis, in his own right? Money he didn’t inherit from the family?”

“Yes. His family gave him nothing, and cut him off from his trust fund after he left home. He made most of his wealth from his brand.”

“In the fashion industry?”

“Yes.”

“Who stood to benefit from the will?”

“I did,” Jarvis said, to Steve’s surprise. “He left me the apartment and a years' wages. Everything else of value will go to charity.”

“It hasn’t yet?”

“With no body found, he cannot be declared legally dead for years. But after that, er…”

“I gotcha. So, he leaves you the apartment, he leaves his money to charity, is there anything else in the will at all?”

“Yes. He left a few items of sentimental value to his friends, and a fifty to his brother.”

“… Is that fifty grand, or…?”

“No, fifty dollars. Some bet they had, I’d presume.”

“You said they didn’t talk.”

Again, the butler shrugged. “They were twins, and both very competitive. I wouldn’t have put it past them to have bet about this when they were younger.”

“Alright.” Steve made a mental note to get a copy of the will as soon as he was able. “I getcha, yeah.”

His thoughts drifted, as though of their own accord, to his own younger brother, and he wondered if, as distant as Tony and Greg seemed now, there had once been a time when they were close. Perhaps their father had pitted them in competition against each other — he seemed the type — or perhaps their personalities were really as different as Jarvis had suggested, but Steve knew first hand the kind of bond a shared childhood could forge. He felt touched by the little joke in the will, a reference to an old bet.

He glanced back down at his notebook, skimming the questions he’d wanted to ask.

“Mr. Stark told me you were around on the last day Tony was seen,” he said, “can you tell me about that?”

Jarvis seemed to relax fractionally now that they had left the topic of family history. “Yes. I came up here at seven in the morning. Master Tony woke at nine-thirty and ate breakfast. It was a Friday, so he went downstairs to work, but he seemed… distracted. When I went down to talk to him and he was on his phone, texting. He was snappy with me. I chalked it up to relationship issues — he was meeting his ex fiancée later in the day.”

“Did he often get snappy with you?”

“Oh, sometimes. He was like a little terrier, Tony. He’d snap at your ankles and mean nothing by it.” Jarvis said the phrase like he had repeated it many times before, something fond leaking into his frosty voice, “He wasn’t mean, not like the way the rest of the family is. Couldn’t muster up the cruelty, as much as he had tried sometimes.”

“Alright. What’d you talk about?”

“I went down to remind him he was lunching out. It was on his calendar, and I hadn’t seen him leave.”

“Any idea what he was texting about?”

“None.” Jarvis, Steve reflected, was less talkative than most people he interviewed; he answered questions directly, avoided side tangents or justifications. Steve appreciated the focus, but he knew exactly how much a tangent could give away.

“So, he went out to lunch?”

“Yes. He agreed to meet Mr. Golmen at 12:30. He left around 12:00.” Jarvis paused, then added, a little peevishly: “With the way the traffic was, he would certainly have been late. He was meeting Golmen at The Rabid Hare.”

Steve clicked the nib of his pen in and out, glancing down at the rough timeline he was putting together in his notebook. “Did you ever see him again?”

“No. He called me twice, though.”

“When was that?”

“First, at a quarter to four. He asked me to read him his schedule for the day.”

“Do you remember that schedule?”

“Yes. He didn’t have too much on his plate. He had already met Golmen for lunch, and he’d left most of the day free. I had assume he planned to return to work, but he never did. And, let’s see, if I recall correctly he only had one other appointment; he was meeting his ex fiancée at five for dinner.”

“That would be Natasha Romanov?”

“It would indeed.”

“Tell me about her. Had they been broken up for long?”

“Oh, she was awful. Absolutely awfully. She was a gold digger, only there for the money — drove poor Master Tony crazy with her demands —but he’d stuck around for far too long.” Jarvis wrinkled his nose as though he was smelling something unpleasant. “They broke up in May, I believe. She’d finally pushed too far, and he left her.”

“Wasn’t she a model? Why did she need Tony’s money?”

“A foot model,” Jarvis scoffed, “she wasn’t bringing in the kind of money he was. Picky about the jobs she took. She wanted his family connections, too; she was disappointed to learn he’d been disowned ages ago. She kept pushing him to try to reach out to family.”

“Did she have anything to do with him going to see his father this summer?”

Jarvis shrugged. “She could have, but I don’t think she did. As far as I’m aware, Tony hadn’t seen her since May, and his father’s birthday was late August. The timeline doesn’t add up. You know what, though?”

“What?”

Jarvis leaned forward, his surprisingly sharp elbows braced against his pudgy knees. The misshapen yellow chair he was sitting in creaked, “I caught the nosy little bitch in here months after they broke up. He hadn’t invited her.”

Both the announcement and the unexpectedly crude insult caught Steve’s attention. He glanced up sharply, “When was that?”

“Not long ago. He had just returned from his visit home, so I believe it would have been… oh, September 10th? September 7th? I came up to fix his dinner and she was in his kitchen, rifling through the drawers.”

“Did she say why she was here?”

“She said she had been sleeping with Tony, and he’d only just left, but I knew she was lying.”

“Why was that?”

“Because he was sleeping with Tiberius Stone all the way across the city.”

“Was that a significant other of his, or…?”

“Just a friend. I don’t believe they were ever serious or exclusive.”

“Alright. Did you ask Tony about it?”

“Yes. She left before I could call him or the police. He didn’t pick up the phone when I called, but when he returned that night I let him know what happened.”

“What did he do?”

“He changed the keys for the third time that month, and he bought more alarms,” Jarvis gestured at the ceiling, “you wouldn’t be able to tell, but there’s three separate systems running here. He was a paranoid man, Master Tony. He locked himself up in his room that night. I can show you he has deadbolts on that door. I think he was worried she was out to hurt him.”

“So, it would have been two systems at the time when she came in?”

“Yes.”

“Did either of them alert you?”

“No. One had been off, I believe, and the other malfunctioned.”

“Alright, so, let’s come back to the timeline of that last day. You said he called you twice. First, he had asked for his schedule, and then…?”

“And then he called me again around 4:30, letting me know that he was planning to go the beach with friends after dinner, and to not bother waiting up.”

“You would normally have waited for him to return?”

“Normally, yes, but I also normally cooked his dinner. It wasn’t surprising for him to send me home early after he’d eaten elsewhere.”

Steve noted it down. “What did he call you on? Where from?”

“Oh, I think—“ Jarvis paused, considering it. “I think from Golmen’s landline. It wasn't a familiar number. It was his voice on the phone, though. He said he was waiting up for a cab.”

“Was Tony a good swimmer?”

“I don’t believe he was a swimmer at all. He was a big fan of getting drunk on the beach. His brother, perhaps…”

“Gregory liked to go swimming?”

“Boating, mostly. I think it’s yachts these days.” 

Steve made a note, though he wasn't too sure it was relevant. “Was it storming, when An—Tony called you?”

“No, not until nine or ten at night.”

“Do you think that, if he was drunk, Tony would have gone into the waves?”

Jarvis shrugged. “He could be a risk taker, I suppose.”

“Do you know which friends he was planning to meet with?”

“No, he didn’t say.”

“When did you notice he was missing?”

“He wasn’t there when I got to work that morning, and he didn’t pick up his phone. At first, I assumed he was sleeping off the night before at someone else’s place, but once the whole day passed and I heard nothing from him, I began to worry. I called Golmen, Romanov, Stone, and a few of his other party friends. Golmen had seen him the day before. Romanov said he never turned up to dinner with her. Stone was in France. No one else had heard any other news of him, so I called his family.”

“Why did you think his family would know? You said they weren’t close.”

Jarvis hesitated, pursing his thin lips, and finally settled on, “I thought they may be able to get an answer quicker than I could.”

“Alright. Are the twins identical?”

The butler blinked, momentarily confused at the change of topic. “Oh, yes. But Gregory dyes his hair.”

“Outside of that, are there any tells? Height, weight, bone structure? Any major differences in voice or manner of speech?”

“No, I don’t believe I can think of any. Anyone who’s spoken to both of them can tell you they’re very different people, though.”

Steve took a moment to finish his notes, and clicked his pen, setting it down by the notebook in his lap.

“So,” he asked, letting something light, conversational, into his voice, “What do you think happened?”

Jarvis started, his eyes going wide for a moment in a way that was almost guilty.

“Best not to speculate,” he said, shortly.

“You knew Tony well, though,” Steve pressed, “worked with him for five years.”

Jarvis winced, his eyes fixed on the glass coffee table.

“Master Tony,” he said, finally, “was under a lot of pressure. He was worried about his ex fiancée hurting him. His family had only just come back into the picture, and they were… quite a handful, to deal with. His father tended to put an enormous amount of pressure on him. His brother was just as competitive as Tony himself, but without the basic human decency to hold him back. There was a lot on his plate. It’s possible that he could… want to be gone.”

Steve nodded solemnly, making another note in his notebook, but the butler wasn’t done.

“With a family like his,” he repeated, putting a little more emphasis on the words, “who wouldn’t want to be gone, sometimes?”

Jarvis gave Steve the phone numbers for all of Tony’s contacts, including Golmen and Romanov, and repeated Howard Stark’s advice to avoid telling Golmen who had hired him. Once Steve returned to the office, he asked Bucky to call both numbers and schedule a meeting, but it turned out to be unnecessary; Romanov had already emailed him back.

She would be delighted to meet, she had written, and help out the investigation in any way available to her. How was lunch tomorrow?

Steve pencilled it in.

Then, sitting back with a freshly brewed cup of coffee, he turned his computer on and looked up Josey Gardner. 


	3. natasha romanov

Natasha Romanov was beautiful in a way that felt a little unreal to Steve, the features of her face perfectly proportioned. If her nose was any smaller, she would perhaps have been mousy. If her eyes were any bigger, she would have looked childish, doe-eyed. Her eyelashes were long and thick, just on the line where Steve couldn’t tell if they were fake. Her hair, bright red, should have looked unnatural, but somehow matched her pale, pinkish skin perfectly, as though no other color could possibly work.

She was wearing a form-fitting black dress with the word “influencer” written in gold across the bust and heels so tall that he thought the steep angle should sure make her tip forward. Steve stared at the perfect globes of her breasts, outlined by the clinging black dress, and tried valiantly to make himself want her. 

“My eyes are up here, buck-o,” she said, amused, and Steve remembered himself; this was a time for missing person case, not his ongoing sexuality crisis.

“You’re a little short to be a model, that’s all.” he said. Even in the heels, which must have been more than six inches tall, the top of her head barely came up to his cheekbone.

“Foot model, honey,” she corrected him, something derisive in her voice, as she took a seat at the table she had reserved for the two of them.

“Oh,” Steve said, realizing he knew nothing about the business. He sat, too. The plush stools at the tea house she had chosen were small, and he felt like he was perching on a narrow tree stump. “No one had mentioned. You model shoes?”

“I didn’t say footwear model,” Natasha corrected, pushing her high heels off with her toes. Her toenails were painted black and red. “foot model. Barefoot shoots only.”

Huh. He supposed there was a market for everything, though he couldn’t quite see the appeal.

A waitress filtered in and poured both of them black tea without asking. Steve scowled; he didn’t want black tea.

“They only employ psychics here,” Natasha informed him, “They intuit what you want. Let them know if you have any allergies.”

“… OK,” Steve said, taking a sip of his tea. It was awful. He hated tea. “I was told you bake?”

“Mmhm. My erotic cakes have been voted New York’s sexiest three years running.”

“Oh.” Steve couldn’t picture what that would look like.“Uh, congrats.”

She had so taken him off guard that he had to consult his notebook, scanning through everything he had wanted to ask her. Meanwhile, the waitress returned.

“Your appetizers,” She said, putting a plate of seaweed salad in front of Natasha and four plastic-wrapped fortune cookies in front of Steve.

“Thank you,” said Natasha.

“So,” said Steve, “you dated Tony Stark?”

“Yes. We were engaged.”

“For how long?”

“Two months. We dated for six,” she hooked some of her salad onto chopsticks and slurped it neatly, licking little bits of green off her lips, “but I had to end it. He was an alcoholic. It was getting out of control.”

“You ever meet his family?”

“No. He hadn’t seen them for years, he told me. I was sure he’d take me to see them once we got engaged, but he declined.”

“You were going to meet him the day he went missing, weren’t you?”

“I was, but he never made it. We were supposed to have dinner at my place.”

“Why?”

“He never told me. I assumed he was going to attempt reconciliation, or he’d simply been planning to try to get into my pants. He could be like that, Tony — I wouldn’t put it past him to think I’d be ready for a booty call only a few months after we broke off our engagement.”

“Alright. Did you ever meet?”

“No. He never got there. I called him twice, and then, when he didn’t answer, decided he’d changed his mind.”

The waitress returned, taking away Natasha’s empty bowl, and served their entreés; a seafood platter, shrimp arranged messily in the shape of a heart, for Natasha, and heaping plate of condiment-less French fries for Steve. He tried a fry and found it unsalted and greasy.

“Do you know who Thorlief Golmen is?” Steve asked.

“Is that the friend with the eagles?” Natasha asked, “Sure, we’d met.”

“Eagles?”

“Oh, he’s… a little cuckoo, if you’ll excuse the pun. Unemployed. He lives off a trust fund and buys a new bird of prey every week.”

“Oh,” Steve said, writing down ‘ _TG birds,’_ “Huh. Did you like him?”

“Didn’t know him well enough to form an opinion one way or another,” Natasha shrugged, “Tony seemed to get on well with him, though I think half the reason they were friends was just that Tony thought it’d be upset his father.”

“Was that because of the activism?”

“Yes, mostly. Frankly, though, I don’t think there’s a bone in Golmen’s body that Stark senior would approve of. Loud. Unemployed. Big spender. Bird poop literally everywhere. He smelled.”

“Ah.” Reluctantly, Steve ate another fry. “His butler told me he caught you in Tony’s apartment, once, after they broke up. This would be somewhere between the seventh and the tenth.”

“Oh, yes. Tony called me on the seventh and asked me to meet him. Told me the passcode to disable the alarms and let me know where the spare key was. He never showed up, though, only his butler, shouting that he was going to call the police and that I wasn’t supposed to be in there.”

“That’s odd.”

Natasha nodded earnestly, her big green eyes going even bigger, “That’s what I thought. Two times that he’d told me to meet him and failed to show. Out of character, odd… I was worried, really. Memory issues, the strange behavior… maybe he’d had a brain tumor, or something. I’d read about that happening, you know.”

“Was he ever much of a swimmer?”

“Who, Tony? No, no, I can’t say that he was. He liked the hot tub, certainly, but he didn’t like water over his face. He said it reminded him of being waterboarded. He could be quite the drama queen, our Tony. But I suppose if you got him drunk enough…”

“Mm.” Steve chewed the mouthful of fries he had reluctantly started digging into. “Do you knowany friends he may have gone to the beach with?”

Natasha shook her head. “No one specific comes to mind. ”

“Do you know anything about a woman named Josey?”

“Nope.”

Steve nodded, making a note in his notebook. She spoke before he could.

“The family’s hired you,” she said, “Howard Stark or Gregory?”

“Howard,” Steve said, “he feels the police investigation hadn’t been thorough enough.”

“Well, you can tell him that if he needs anything at all, I’m always here,” Natasha said, de-hulling a shrimp with her long fingernails, “if he needs anything from me.”

“I can pass on the offer,” Steve said, nodding.

“Really, if he needs anything at all…” Casually, she stretched, arching her back in a graceful, catlike manner, and set one of her small, pink feet to rest on Steve’s lower thigh. Irritated, Steve pushed her foot off his lap with the back of his hand.

“Yeah, I’ll let him know,” he reiterated.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

It was pointless to ask her what she thought of the case. Steve called for the check.

* * *

An hour later, Steve was back at his desk, his boots off in the corner, his non-client seeing slippers on, his notebook positioned in front of him. Howard Stark had given him a folder containing quite a lot of dirt on the friend his son had met with on that last day. He had read through the criminal record, the restraining order, the credit score that was far too low for someone clearly wealthy, the noise complaints from the neighbors, and the salacious description from a tabloid, but, having broken the CD drive on his computer several years ago, he hadn’t had a chance to look through the CCTV footage.

That morning, he had swiped Bucky’s laptop — his secretary hadn’t exactly been pleased about that, considering Steve’s dubious track record with technology — and inserted the CD into the side drive. It was taken from a camera positioned over Stark’s street. The clock in the lower left hand corner read, 09/20, 11:36 pm. A man came into view, walking with his head down, his face obscured from the camera by a hood over his face. He was broad-shouldered, dressed in a vest over a dark hoodie; Steve could tell apart no distinguishing features in the grainy footage. He walked, confidently, right up to the door of the lobby,pulled a gloved hand out of his pocket, and jiggled the door handle twice.

It was locked, most likely due to the late hour, but this didn’t hold the mystery guest back. Taken aback only for a minute, he punched in the door code and stepped inside. The footage cut sharply to the lobby camera, now in color. It was now clear the man was purposefully trying to tilt his head down in a way that would hide his face from the camera. Steve could see that his hoodie and vest were both grey, and that his gloves were yellow. As the man strode over to the stair exit, avoiding the elevator, Steve thought he caught a face in the shadow of the hood, illuminated briefly by the wall-lamps. He rewound the footage, trying to pause on the exact frame when he’d seen it. The quality of the recording was low. He was sure he was catching the outline of the lower half of a face, a square jaw shadows from what could be a beard, but any details were nearly impossible to tell apart. With a sigh, Steve let the footage play on.

It cut again, this time showing the recording from Stark’s personal alarm system. The quality of the camera should have been much higher, but the intruder must have turned off the lights on the landing; Steve only saw the words, “There was someone at your door at 11:45 PM” and a square filled with darkness. This was the only recording that came with audio, and Steve cranked up the volume all the way up to listen.

The man was breathing hard, mostly likely from having ascended six flights of stairs. Stark’s keypad beeped and buzzed as he tried, unsuccessfully, to turn off the alarm.

Something clattered. The man muttered two words that Steve couldn’t make out, something that could have been a curse. Steve replayed it, hoping to catch them on the second listen through. The second word, if he strained, could have been “ears.”

The recording cut shortly after. Steve replayed it twice more, looking for anything he might have missed, took screenshots of notable frames, and shut the laptop.

There was no proof, then, that Thorlief Golmen had been at Stark’s apartment after his disappearance. He hadn’t met the man himself yet, but the only distinguishing feature of the would-be intruder had been his size, clearly much taller than average and broad shouldered. Steve himself, if he put on the hoodie, vest, and gloves, could make a very similar figure.

Still frowning in through, Steve made his way up to the outer office to return Bucky’s laptop.

“Golmen call you back?” He asked, and Bucky shook his head.

“Nope. I left another voicemail today.”

“I got his address,” Steve said, gruffly, “from the restraining order Stark gave me. Might be about time for a house call, don’tcha think?” 

“Where’s it at?” Bucky asked, his tone indicating clearly that he didn’t really care.

“Great Neck Gardens. Looked like a family home; he must have inherited it.”

“Nice place, it must be.” Bucky, Steve realized, was aiming to try and shoot the shit with him. They hadn’t really talked, lately, not the way they had used to.

“Yeah, looked that way,” he said, noncommittally, neither shutting the conversation down nor opening any new avenues for his friend to pursue.

“I shot a wedding back around there last weekend,” Bucky said, “some little park, I’unno. Nice place. Couple was crazy, though.”

“That so?”

“Mmhm. Guy wanted a tank of ants in the picture with ‘em, and his girl thought he was kidding ‘till it came time to shoot the pictures. Ended up with her walking out.”

“Jeez,” Steve said, trying to imagine the kind of relationship that led up to that, “I’da thought you’d get more nutters working front desk at a detective agency than with your little photography business, but whatdaya figure.”

“Whatdaya figure,” Bucky echoed.

Steve glanced up at the clock. It was a quarter to three; if he wanted to make it all the way across the city to meet Golmen at a reasonable time, it was really time to leave.

“Listen,” said Steve, on the verge of asking Bucky to come along, for old times’ sake, and then he caught a glimpse of Gail’s red hair through the glass window to the door of her office. Something twisted in his gut. “I’ve got to head out, man.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: thor


	4. thorlief golmen

Steve had looked up Thorlief Golmen’s house on Google Maps before he arrived. He knew to expect the McMansion, painted unassuming shades of tan and grey, the sharp angles of its narrow garage and overlarge windows clashing with the smooth slopes of the overhanging roof. A single lonely turret stuck out of the roof at a weird angle. The wide driveway was in desperate need of re-paving, and the front yard was unkempt, overgrown.

It wasn’t his place to judge, Steve supposed, trudging up the driveway. He’d never been one for garden maintenance. Then again, he also hadn’t moved into an ugly house with what looked to be a quarter of an acre of front yard, so he had that going for him.

Despite the fact that it was still early afternoon, it was quickly becoming dark, downcast. Fine drops of rain seemed to evaporate as they fell, leaving the cool air horribly humid. Something dark slithered in the grass, its side brushing against Steve’s shoe. Steve, whose eyes had been on the house, glanced down sharply and jumped back, quickening his steps.

It occurred to him, not the first the first time, that it was possible Thorlief wouldn’t even be home. He could stake the place out for a while, then, flag him down when he came home. He hadn’t chosen this career because he balked at a little surveillance work, that was for sure.

He saw a light on inside, though, and he was hopeful.

The rain started pouring in earnest. Steve knocked twice on the door, thumping hard. He thought he could hear a man shout inside, but the door didn’t open.

Impatient, huddling closer to the house to stay away from the rain, he counted to thirty and knocked on the door again.

Once more, a man shouted. Once more, Steve couldn’t make out what he was saying. He counted to thirty once more, and then sixty. It seemed, now, that he wasn’t welcome.

Knock as he might, he wasn’t police. He couldn’t force anyone to talk to him; his best bet, he supposed, would have to be to wait outside and catch Golmen when he was out.

It was as he was turning back into the rain that the door opened. The man inside was taller and blonder than Steve, which was an achievement by itself. His long matted hair fell unevenly over his bearded face. He smelled strongly of weed, and wore nothing but tighty-whities and an old robe.

“Sorry ‘bout that, my boy,” he said, clapping one heavy, warm hand on Steve’s shoulder, “I was getting dressed. Why are you here?”

Ah, alright, then.

“My name is Steve Rogers. I’m investigating Mr. Antonio Stark’s disappearance,” Steve said, careful to keep off the name of the man who had hired him. “I left you a few messages.”

“Oh, I’m on—“ Golmen swayed on his feet. Steve realized he was either drunk, high, or both. “A technology cleanse. I chucked my phone in—“

He hiccuped loudly.

“Chucked it in the fountain, aye. I’ve been so—” he waved one hand to indicate everything around him, “—I’ve been so upset about it all. All I do is feed the birds n’— n’ all this. Haven’t even been to the meetings. Proper depr’ssed.” 

It was probably unethical to interview this man. His testimony, Steve knew, was likely to be unreliable. Still, some strange gut instinct had him stepping, fluidly, into the house, reaching up to support Golmen. “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Golmen?”

“Call me Thor,” Golmen pushed him away, stumbling towards a worn out sofa, the only item of furniture in his living room, “’S Thor, is what it is. You hear me?”

He was the kind of drunk, Steve worried, that could boil over into aggression. He would have to tread carefully. “Yep. Thor.”

Thor sat heavily down on the sofa, which creaked under his weight and squeaked as it slid back on the floorboards, “So they haven’t found him yet?”

“They haven’t.”

“That’s funny, since I thought,” Thor hiccuped again, “I thought they would have found him yet, one way— or another. Aye, I thought... oh, old Odin's beard...”

Thor wiped his eyes on the sleeve for his robe, staring Steve down with big sad eyes. Steve felt a jolt of surprise; he recognized the odd curse from the video, the word he'd mistaken for "ear." 

Steve’s attention was caught, briefly, by a rapid, swooping motion outside the window. A raptor had fallen onto the grass, and now it soared once more, the long black snake clutched between its claws.

“What do you mean,” he asked carefully, “one way or another?”

“Well, either she’d killed him or— or, he was on a bender, right?” Thor asked, “But I thought she’d killed him. Since ‘d seen ‘im... last day, ’d seen him, n’ he said he was going out meet her.”

He reached down under the couch, pulling an opaque orange water bottle out from under the coach, and took a long, sad swig of its contents.

“You saw him on the last day?”

“We talked politics,” Thor said, staring up at Steve with watering blue eyes, “talked ‘bout how his old man was wrecking the holy earth, all that war— all that destruction, the weapons —“

As inebriated as he was, he seemed to come alive as they reached the topic.

“He wanted to talk— wanted to come to the meeting, did he not? Said he’d have something for us. I went to go looking, but…”

“What did he have for you?” Steve asked, stepping closer, his eyes fixed on Thor.

The taller man just shook his head, moving back, “’S secret, is what it is. I went looking for it, but I couldn’t get in. Couldn’t get in at all.”

He took another long sip of his drink.

“You thought Natasha Romanov killed him?” Steve prodded.

“Aye, he was gonna go see her. She was something else, n’ that’s coming from— that’s coming from me. Here, I was on,” Thor reached into his pocket and jiggled a bottle of pills in Steve’s direction, “so many pills, Stan. Used to be until I saw the truth. Don’t take them anymore, I— I just carry it around to show people, y’see?”

He shook the bottle and set it down on the floor.

“I used to be a nurse,” he said, “proper job. Had all the— seen all all of it. But she was something else. Seemed normal ’till the cracks started to show.”

“Cracks how?”

Thor shook his head, shrugged, “Cracks.”

Steve could accept defeat. “You said he was going to confront her?”

“Yeah, he said— he said it was high time the truth came out about everyone. Said fuck her, y’know, for dece— dici— for lying to him, and, n’— said he’d— he’d be at the meeting. To tell everyone.”

“The meeting?”

“Anti-war America. I’d found my calling, y’see—? I used to— proper job, ‘till I saw the truth…”

Steve interrupted him. “When was that?”

“‘Round seven. On the 14th.”

“Same day you went for lunch?”

“Mm. Lunch and back here, yeah. I’d shown him my owl.”

Steve frowned, confused, “Is that a euphemism?”

“No, my owl— barn owl. I can show you.”

“… That’s alright. So, he told you then he had something to show you at the meeting?”

Thor blinked, his gaze suddenly suspicious, “Are you w— y’with the police?”

“No.”

“Who’re you with, then?”

Steve pursed his lips and pulled out his rehearsed answer, “I’m trying to help Mr. Stark’s friends and family—“

“Who’re you with?”

“… I’ll give you my card,” Steve decided, “see if can talk to me when you’re sober, alright?”

Thor stared at him. Steve scrawled _wants justice for T. Stark_ next to his own name on his business card, hoping that would be enough to motivate Thor, and handed it over.

“Was it the family?”

It was easier to pretend not to understand the question. “What?”

“‘Cos I can tell you about the family, alright,” Thor slurred, getting to his feet. Steve braced himself for the possibility that punches were going to be thrown. “Bunch of war profit— profle — shouldn’t’ve been legal, what they’re doing, playin’ both—“

He hiccuped, again, and jabbed one big, heavy finger into the center of Steve’s chest. “But you already knew, ‘cos you’re working for them—“

“I think I’m going to have to go now,” Steve said, pushing his hand down from his chest, “You have a good day, now, Thor. Get sober.”

Thor didn’t stop him as he walked back out the door to his motorbike, his head craned low to keep the rain off his face.

* * *

Steve was halfway to cheerful when he climbed up the stairs to their third-floor office, put in motion by the momentum of the case. He never tried to take joy in other people’s misery, never tried to let their problems pull up his own spirit, but it was good to be working, good to have something occupying all of attention.

“Bucky!” He called, shutting the door of the inner office behind him as he entered, “I’m gonna need you to look up—“

Bucky’s desk was empty. The only other person in the room was Gail. She was standing, leaning one shoulder against the wall, and smoking out of the window.

“Hi, Steve,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, the gruffness in his voice not befitting to the apology, “I’ll look it up myself.”

“You could run it by me,” she offered, “you know, your partner, who’s heard less about your glamorous high profile missing person case than the secretary.”

For a moment, he wanted to protest, say something along the lines of, _you’re not my partner. You left me._ But, of course, she was his partner, at the firm if not at home. He wondered if she had always known it would end there, even years ago when he’d imagined that “Rogers & Richards” would be a temporary name, just until they were married and she took his name, when their lives had seemed so firmly interlinked that that Steve couldn’t imagine the untangling that would follow? Had she, even back then, known that it would be his insufficiencies that would end it?

 _I want you to be happy, Steve,_ she had said, _and I want to be happy myself._

It would have been easier if he could blame Bucky for the break-up, if she had chosen him before she left Steve, but he knew the truth; they hadn’t even known each back then, not well. She had left Steve, because he wasn’t enough, and she started seeing Bucky, later, because he was.

“I,” he said, stiffly, “I was going to ask him to look up how much foot models make.”

Gail blinked, clearly taken aback. “Like, a footwear model, or…?”

“No, just. A foot model. Something’s not making sense to me.” After a moment’s hesitation, Steve took Bucky’s vacated seat at the front desk, and, haltingly, filled Gail in on everything he had learned about Natasha Romanov.

Gail ground out the butt of what was, by then, her second cigarette and frowned, closing the window. “He was going to say something about Romanov at the anti-war meeting?”

“That’s what Th— Golmen told me. He goes by Thor, did I tell you? Like the Greek god.”

“Norse, Steve, and you know it. That’s weird, though. What could she have possibly done that could matter there?” Gail picked up Stark’s heavy manilla folder, which Steve had left up front for Bucky to file, “You planning on giving his father another call?”

“Yeah. I need to interview the brother, too. If I can get my hands on Golmen’s police interrogation, it’d be ideal. Romanov’s, too.”

“She’d probably have told you the same thing she told the police.”

“Mm. She waited for him, and he didn’t show. It’s not the kind of story that clears someone of suspicion so quickly. No, she must have had a good alibi.”

“Maybe someone had seen her,” Gail suggested, “Maybe she made calls.”

“Mm,” Steve agreed, “I’d like to see the file.”

“Identical twins, you said? That’s one complication.” Before Steve could reply, Gail checked her watch, and reached for her coat, “I gotta go, Steve, I’m meeting someone at one. Infidelity case I stole from you. I’ll be around if you want someone to bounce thoughts off, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He stayed at the desk, watching her go, some strange, complicated mess of emotion pushing at his ribcage from the inside.

He didn’t dwell on it. Instead, he pulled up Howard Stark’s number on his cellphone and dialed.

He was on hold for over twenty minutes, during which Bucky returned and dislodged Steve from the front desk and back into his office. He doodled, aimlessly, on scrap paper, trying to recreate the sharp edges of the outfits Tony Stark had dressed his runway models in. On paper, there was something satisfying, even comforting, to the sharp edges and clean lines of his designs. Steve wondered what kind of man Tony was (or, perhaps more realistically, had been) to try to drag these perfect geometric forms, these platonic ideals of shapes, into the real world. He thought now that it had been what had bothered him about the designs when he’d first seen them; they seemed to inhabit a different world entirely, a cleaner, more stream-liked world where clothes didn’t wrinkle, a world that accommodated perfection.

“Alright,” a cheerful female voice startled Steve -- he’d forgotten he was on hold, “Mr. Stark will be with you now, if you’re still on the line.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I’m here.”

She transferred the call.

“Afternoon,” Howard Stark said. He sounded busy. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, hello. I went down to talk to Golmen today.” Steve expected Stark to be interested in these news.

He wasn’t disappointed; the man’s tone changed audibly when he asked, “Oh?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get much out of him, right now, but he mentioned that Antonio may have had something people were after. His ex, possibly, and Golmen himself.”

“Where did he have it?” Stark asked sharply, cutting him off. “Who did he give it to?”

“I— well, I can’t be sure. I didn’t get there yet. I was actually calling to ask if I could speak to your other son.”

“Gregory? What for?”

“Just wanted to check anyone he may have been speaking to. A few people have brought him up, now. Are you still in town? I could speak to him over the phone, if he’s in California.”

Stark hesitated, but then allowed, “We’re both still in New York.”

“Nice of him,” Steve observed, his tone overwhelmingly light, like he’s forgotten that Gregory has been cut off the company not long ago, “to come down with you. How’s he liking it?”

“I— he has been out on the— the clubs. He’s been liking it just fine.” Stark seemed surprised by his own words, “I’ll email you a time you could meet him. Will that be all?”

“No, one more thing. Would you happen to have a key to his work office? Do you know who has been through it? I’d like to look around.”

“The police looked,” Stark said, “and the family, looking for answers. We didn’t find anything but endless pictures of Barbie dolls wearing balloon animals, or whatever his latest theme was. You’re free to have a look, though. I’ll get you a key ASAP.”

“Thanks,” Steve said mildly, adding a rounded, balloon -like shape to the sketches he’d been making on his spare paper. “I’ll look forward to it.”

Stark gave him a curt goodbye and hung up.

Steve’s mind was, for a minute, drawn back to the clothes. He remembered the half-collapsed figure of the mannequin he’d seen in Tony Stark’s inner office, ghostly in the darkness. Something about it, obscured by shadow, half crumbled and silent in the locked room, reminded him of Stark himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: Gregory Stark.  
> and after that, finally...


	5. gregory stark

It was two days before Steve could meet with Gregory Stark, time that weighed heavily on him given the theory that was beginning to form in his mind. His time wasn’t exactly free; the first morning, he took over surveillance from Gail on the infidelity case as she rushed out to meet with another client. When he arrived back to the office, given a little time to himself, he returned to his internet research.

The twins, Edwin Jarvis had told him, would be impossible to tell apart if not for the fact that Gregory dyed his hair. Given how much of the Starks’ lives could be found photographed on the internet, Steve elected to check this for himself.

In the earliest pictures he could find of the twins, toddler age, he could see no difference. Several websites captioned the same pictures differently —one would identify Antonio as the boy on the left, while the next placed him on the right. In later photos, though, a slight dissimilarity emerged in the faces of the twins, their expressions; Steve found himself able to tell Gregory apart by the skeptical arch of his eyebrow, recognize Tony’s playful half-smirk. He knew that the way that Jarvis had talked about the twins could have biased the way that he saw them, but he could have sworn that there was something predatory to Gregory’s steady gaze, even in the older pictures. When he’d been on the police force, and even in his current line of work, he’d seen this kind of look. It didn’t sit right with him.

It was Tony, though, that Steve found had some kind of magnetic pull, drawing his attention in every picture, every summary of the Stark fortune and family tree. It could have just been the air of mystery around the man’s life and his fate — Steve’s fascination with mystery had, after all, been a driving factor for the business he’d ended up in. Still, though, he felt as though something about his interest ran deeper than that. At times, scrolling through Stark’s public romances and the dramatic break-ups thereof, zooming in on photographs of a smirking young teenager with scared eyes, Steve saw something of himself in the man, coupled with the kind of bravery Steve had never possessed.

Tony Stark, once he had left home, was loud. He wore what he wanted to wear, openly took both men and women to bed, and made the kinds of friends his father would have hated. He could have inherited the company, Steve read, had had the brains for it, but instead he’d chosen to make a name for himself on his own terms.

Steve thought of his own abandoned art school dreams, thought of the general trajectory of life, filled with echoes of his father’s legacy and promises to do better, to be better, and clicked rapidly out of the tab. It was half past four. For the first time in weeks, citing his relatively un-busy state, he left the office a half an hour early.

That night, he dreamed of dancing shapes and soaring owls.

* * *

The key to Tony Stark’s office arrived in an envelope the next morning. He’d be meeting Gregory Stark for lunch in the building across from it. Steve arrived hours early, when there was still ample space to park his bike in front of the red brick of the building. Part of him was buzzing with excitement. The office, locked to him as it had been before, felt as though it could — should— contain deeply hidden secrets, the skeletons in Stark’s closet.

The slid perfectly into the lock. Steve could see several alarm systems, the same as the apartment had had, installed in Stark’s inner office. None of them sounded when he entered. Disabled.

Steve had wondered, before, why there hadn’t been anything else on this floor, and now he saw the reason. The inner room was much bigger than it had looked like from the lobby, perhaps more of a workshop than an office at all. A desk occupied the front, heavy dark wood. Bookshelves spanned the back walls, full of multi-colored volumes and unidentifiable knickknacks. Papers littered the desk, mingling with scraps of brightly colored fabric. The mannequin he’d seen, dressed in in white, was only one of five, the rest positioned by the shelves behind the desk in various states of dress.

The first mannequin, the one he’d seen before through the window, was the one that caught his attention first. Steve reached down and straightened the mannequin, looking over the sharp haute couture stylized dress Stark had put it in. Most of it was startlingly white, glossy. Something about its form conjured up the image of a wedding dress in Steve’s mind. The sleeves of the mock-up were perfect spheres, huge and impossible; this was, Steve supposed, where Howard Stark had seen balloons. Something red bloomed on the chest of the of the dress, deep scarlet fabric. For a moment, Steve thought it had been meant to imitate a bloodstain, and then he made out the shape of the thing, its elongated body and outstretched wings. It could have been a bird, caught mid-swoop, about to flap its wings and soar, or it could have been a little plane, its nose down, making its final descent. Unable to help himself, Steve reached out and ran his fingers over the smooth, glossy fabric, heavy and drape-like to the touch.

Jarvis had said Stark often kept his workplace messy, but something about the disarray of papers seemed wrong, the lay-out too systematic. The office had been searched, and searched with messy, inept hands. On first glance, the papers seemed to be mostly sketches of mock-ups, with the occasional receipt for materials mixed in. Howard Stark’s complaints once again surfaced in Steve’s mind — _we didn’t find anything,_ he had said, — but Steve found that the task of looking through Tony’s papers almost pleasant. He’d always liked art, and he never made a habit of looking at it, familiar, illogical guilt twisting in the pit of his stomach. This was part of the job, and thus completely allowed, thus the kind of thing no one could see pick an issue with. He wasn’t meeting the brother for hours. No one could fault him for taking his time.

It was one of the final papers he was looking over that caught his eye, buried in the mess of everything else that had been pulled out. He felt another stab of irritation at the mess that had been made by whoever had searched it; most of Tony’s sketches were undated and it was impossible, now, to figure out what he’d been working on when.

Still, something about the piece of paper that caught his attention said _recent._ It had been done in pencil, and the graphite lines were dark and unfaded, unsmudged. Moreover, it depicted the very same dress on the mannequin, the one with the balloon-sleeves and the wedding dress train and the winged red splotch on the center of its chest. Having sifted through hundreds of his papers, a good half of them with notes, Steve recognized Tony’s handwriting on the bottom, his normal slanted half-cursive straightened and capitalized in what must have been a title: JOSEY. Two drops of water had once landed on the center of the paper, narrowly missing the lines of the sketch, and dried.

The police had already been through. The family had already been through. Knowing that he had a right and a quickly emerging reason to do so, Steve folded the paper neatly and stuck it into the inner pocket of his jacket, over his chest.

He glanced at his watch. It was nearly time to meet Gregory Stark.

Steve tidied the papers, leaving them, though still clearly out of order, in a neat pile on the desk, and neatly stepped over the train of the white dress. More than fifteen years after the young woman’s death, Tony’s thoughts had clearly returned to her — or had it been that he’d never forgot?He hadn’t seemed to mention her to his nearest and dearest, though, as far as Steve could tell, none of them had seemed the touchy-feely kind. He hasn’t, as far as Steve had found, ever mentioned her interviews; if anything, he was notoriously tightlipped about his family.

Steve the forms on the other mannequins a quick look, contemplating the designs’ odd, geometric beauty, and then, feeling as though if he didn’t leave now he’d never leave, he stepped out of the room and locked the door behind himself.

* * *

He arrived at the cafe across the street twenty minutes early and found Gregory Stark already waiting for him. Having planned to have the time to calmly order his drink and take a seat by the window, further away from the noise, he felt annoyed to see that his interviewee had chosen to sit by the bar.

Like his brother, Gregory Stark was a well-built man. After having spent so long looking at photographs of his brother, Steve thought he looked bleached out; his hair, which had presumably once been jet black like his brother’s, was dyed a yellowish golden blond. Steve took a moment to consider the logistics of dyeing his short beard, which was blond as the hair. Tony had been evenly tanned. Gregory looked as though he’d never seen the sunshine. Surrounded by ivory skin and bleached hair, his pale blue eyes looked different in hue, colder.

“Afternoon,” Steve said, holding out a hand for him to shake.

Gregory glanced at the clock, and, dragging out his syllables pedantically, drawled, “Good morning.”

Twins, in Steve’s experience, tended to have similar manners; he wondered if, had he been meeting Tony Stark here, he would have gotten the same correction. Somehow, he didn’t feel like Tony would be the sort of person to do that, to start off there.

Steve ordered his coffee and sandwich.

“I wanted to ask about your father’s birthday party this summer.”

“It wasn’t much of a party.” Gregory said, his tone frosty.

“No? Who was there?”

“Just some family. A cousin of ours. Our mother passed away not long ago. He wanted a quieter occasion. We had dinner and talked for a while over a bottle of scotch.”

“This was your first time seeing your brother in how long?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Must have been awkward.”

Gregory scowled. “It was fine.”

Steve wasn’t happy to leave it there, “He didn’t show up for the funeral, though?”

“Excuse me?”

The waitress handed over Steve’s sandwich and Gregory’s croissant. “Your mother’s funeral.”

Gregory shrugged, a jerky, uncomfortable gesture,“I suppose he must have come after the funeral to pay his respects. I don’t know. Father wouldn’t have invited him.”

“Did you talk much when you met this summer?”

“Strictly business.”

Steve raised an eyebrow, surprised, “You’re in different businesses.”

Gregory a hand in the air, like the suggestion was a particularly annoying fly. “Family affairs.”

“Did he tell you anything about his fiancée?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Recently, your father cut you off from the busi—“

Gregory interrupted him. “That doesn’t have anything to do with what happened here.”

“I’d just like to make sure I’m checking all the—“

“Look, I’d been all the way in Germany when Tony drowned. There is absolutely no way that I could have had anything to do with it. I met you,” Here, Gregory turned around severely to face Steve, “as a personal favor to my father, but I’m not going to sit here and be accused of anything.”

He seemed a second’s away from storing out.

“Alright,” said Steve, “I really do appreciate you meeting with me, Mr. Stark. You’ve been a great help.”

Gregory looked like he greatly doubted that could be the truth. One foot already poised to leave, he picked up his coffee.

“How’re you liking New York?” Steve asked, innocently. 

“It’s fine,” Gregory said, clearly annoyed to be bothered, “I’ve been before.”

Steve refused to get the hint. “To visit your brother?”

“No.”

“Oh, still. I saw online you own a yacht here.”

“Does it matter?”

Steve picked up his coffee and turned back to Gregory Stark, taking a slow, thoughtful sip. Lying could be dangerous, but he was starting to feel like it was his only option.

“Oh, just something I heard from one of his friends. He thought you had something on yacht, maybe. Or somewhere else. Hidden, perhaps.”

Gregory Stark’s white face went several degrees whiter.

Steve shrugged, a ‘what can you do’ kind of shrug. “I wouldn’t pay it too much mind. I think he was drunk off his ass and didn’t know what he was saying.”

“I'm sure he didn't. Excuse me,” Gregory said, looking at his watch. “I need to get back to work.”

“Sure,” Steve said, smiling. His sandwich was still untouched in front of it, and he reached for it with the air of a man about to enjoy lunch. “You have a nice day, now.”

Stark left without a goodbye, his footsteps hurried. Watching him out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw with satisfaction that he was reaching for his phone.

As the other man left the little cafe, his phone now pressed to his ear, Steve reached into his bag and pulled out his bulky leather jacket and red baseball cap. It wasn’t a real disguise, but he hoped it would help change his general form and the shape and color of his silhouette for the short while he needed.

He left cash on the table and, with a regretful glance at his nearly untouched sandwich, followed Stark out the door. For a moment, he thought he had lost Stark on the busy street, but then he caught sight of him, still hunched over on the phone. He was leaning against a bright red car some two hundred feet away from him. Steve couldn’t see his expression, but he didn’t look happy, and the detective would have given quite a lot to be able to listen in on the conversation. 

Steve straddled his motorbike and waited, typing a text to Gail one-handed on his phone.Typing each letter took a full five seconds, as he kept glancing up at the red car.

Stark got in the car but didn’t start driving. Steve got through another two words of his text, now feeling it necessary to check on the car more often.

Finally, after that could have been ten minutes or thirty seconds — the anxious waiting state had make it hard to keep track of time — the car started. Steve pulled on his helmet, and, secure that Stark hadn’t seen him on his motorbike, followed.

It was hard not to let Stark know he was being tailed. Steve alternated which side of the road he was driving on, often leaving space for two or three cars between his bike and the red car. Steve had a general idea of where they were going, and, as it turned out, he wasn’t disappointed. Stark turned towards Battery City Park, driving towards the Hudson.

Steve pulled over a ways away as Stark parked by the docks. He had already thought he recognized the enormous, hundred-foot yacht sitting by the docks, but Stark’s confident steps towards it confirmed up.

Steve sent his text to Gail, because he was about to do something very stupid, and, unhurriedly, looking for all the world like he was strolling around the park, followed Stark. It was windy, the air humid and a little salty. Birds pecked at the lawns surrounding Steve, the grass a murky green. The color made it look to Steve like it was hardly trying, making some half-assed effort to look nice grass in a nice park.

Steve let his eyes land casually on the yacht. It was huge, sleek, and white, the logo of Stark Industries on its side. Steve wondered if they had made the boat, or if it was simply advertisement, and decided it was more likely to be the latter.

Standing on the dock, Stark was talking down to another man, probably someone who he’d hired to captain the boat. Steve considered the possibilities. Diving in and climbing the sides of the yacht seemed completely impossible. If he waited until Stark left the dock, he could, possibly, try to jump from the docks and onto the boat. But this risked detection, and if the boat started moving now, it was possible he’d miss it.

“Ten tonight!” Stark was yelling down to the man on deck. If it was any less windy, he’d have caught the rest of of the sentence. Then again, if it was any less windy, Stark wouldn’t have been shouting. “And don’t—“

Somewhere in the distance, something let out a deep, deep honk. Steve stepped around some bushes, drawing as close as he dared.

“— dare sleep in again, you useless— “

The rest of Stark’s words were lost to the wind. Steve frowned, frustrated, as he realized that trying to make out what the man on the boat was saying would be nigh impossible.

Stark turned back to go, and Steve turned away, pretending to be staring out at the Hudson. He needed to check the boat, needed to follow up on one near-impossible hunch. Ten tonight, Stark had said. Steve prayed that he’d understood correctly, that the boat wouldn’t be leaving until ten o’clock that night, or perhaps that, at ten o’clock, they would be meeting somewhere.

He glanced down at his watch, giving Stark fifteen minutes to clear out, then turned to check that the red car was gone. The captain had gone back into the inside of the yacht. No passersby were giving Steve close attention.

One quick look, he told himself, though he knew that he ought to be searching the boat. If the captain sees, asks, he’s mixed up the ship. If the captain asks, he’d been trying to surprise a friend with a ship just like this one.

Steve was afraid he didn’t look like the kind of man who’d have a friend with a yacht.

Just as he’d been trying to make up his mind, the man that Stark had been talking to, the one Steve had start thinking of as the yacht’s captain, climbed back onto the outer part of the ship. Steve watched as he checked that the door to the interior was locked and climbed out onto the dock, heading briskly for the side of the street with the coffee shops and cafes.

This was going to be the best opportunity Steve would get.

He waited, once more, until the man had gone out of sight, giving him and few minutes to double back, and, looking for all the world like he knew what he doing, he boarded the yacht.

The door to the interior was locked, but one of the back windows had been cranked open slightly to let in fresh air. Steve pulled on gloves, wrapped his fingers under the and pushed the window up, sliding inside. His hips slipped through easily, but it was an uncomfortable squeeze around the shoulders — for a moment, Steve contemplated what would happen to him if he got stuck here.

The whole venture was blatantly irresponsible. He was risking losing a playing client. He was risking breaking the law, and all over a hunch, that, when it came down to it, probably wasn’t right. But if there was any chance he would find a person in here—

Five weeks, he reminded himself. He was looking for a body. He was looking for evidence.

Steve closed the window behind himself and looked around the inner room. Comfortable, modern sitting chairs were set out by the walls, all of them a clean-looking beige. A glass coffee table, similar to the one in Tony’s apartment, was in the center of the room, empty except for a compass and a travel magazine. A huge wall-mounted TV occupied one wall, and a floor to ceiling decorative map the other. One of the other walls was decorated with a steering wheel, which was, maybe, functional. A faint scent of the tobacco clung to the interior; Steve wondered who it was that smoked.

Steve gave the room a cursory look over, but it seemed as clean and impersonal and a hotel room.Stairs led down into another level of the boat, and, knowing he didn’t have time to search as thoroughly as he would have liked, Steve took them.

The lights were off. As he fumbled for the light switch, Steve heard something creak above him, one footfall and then another. Far too quickly, the captain had returned to his ship. As he considered the possibilities, hiding or running or coming up to talk to the man himself and feign innocence, Steve’s hand finally found the light switch.

When he saw what was inside the room, all thoughts of his current predicament disappeared from his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: tony! finally!


	6. tony stark, part I

The bottom floor had been meant for entertainment. It was wide, though the ceiling was fairly low; Steve, who stood at six foot three inches, found himself feeling slightly oppressed by it, like he’d hit it coming up on his tip toes. The sparse furniture consisted of nothing but a few counters along the wall and bench-like plush couches. There were windows on the walls, all covered by heavy black blinds. In the center of the room, three disco balls surrounded a stripper pole.

The man handcuffed to the stripper pole had a hood over his head. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of swim trunks, and Steve’s eyes swept over his body. By now, due to the sheer amount of pictures he’d looked through, Steve thought he might be able to recognize Tony Stark without seeing his face.

If this was Tony, he had lost weight. His six pack, which had been faintly pronounced in every picture Steve had seen, had faded. The last of his tan was still valiantly clinging on. Several deep, dark bruises blotted on the underside of his ribs, and Steve could see healing interrogation marks on his lower arms. None of it looked recent; he’d bet even the newest of the bruises had happened over a week ago. And yet, clearly, the man was still alive. How long had he been kept here? Was it possible that Tony Stark’s own brother had kidnapped him and kept him for five weeks in a yacht on the Hudson River, less than ten minutes’ driving away from his apartment?

With his hands bound behind him, it seemed that the man had no comfortable position available to him; the pole, hard and narrow, was the only thing on which he could lean, and laying down on the floor would sure hurt his wrists. Despite this, Steve saw the deep, measured breaths he was taking. He was asleep.

Steve’s hands ached to undo the handcuffs, to pull off the hood. He wanted badly to help this man, to save him, but he also ached to know. The idea that Tony Stark, who had started feeling so real to Steve through something as small, as impersonal, as press photos and rough sketches of clothes, could be here right now seemed unreal, overwhelming. The intense interest he’d taken in the dead man was safe; with him alive and in front of Steve, the detective found he didn’t know what to do with it.

More pressing was the matter of the captain upstairs. Was he armed? It would be stupid of Gregory not to arm him. What would happen if Steve was noticed here, if it was clear Steve had learned their secrets? Could he win that fight?

No, there was only one thing to do.

Steve pulled out his phone, dialed 911, and realized that he had no reception.

Was it some quality of the room? Had they done something to make sure no calls could be made from here, just in case?

Once again, footsteps sounded somewhere on the upper level of the yacht. Knowing it would buy him almost no time at all if the man was headed down, Steve shut the door to the lowest level and turned off the lights. There was no place to hide in this room, with its open dance floor and low padded counters. Steve had not brought his gun. He had not expected this turn of events, though he’d been keeping his phone charged, ready to get the police involved.

If what he had surmised about the Starks was true — and, considering what he was in the room with, Steve was struggling to see how it couldn’t be— his life was now in danger. He was regretting the sparse details in the text he’d sent Gail, though he wasn’t particularly sure giving more details would have helped his case. He ran through several possible scenarios in which he was discovered, the possibilities of threatening, of bartering, of feigning ignorance. He didn’t like his chances.

It would make more sense to try to force his way past the single man on the boat. Even if he was armed, the boat was parked on the Hudson River, in broad daylight, in plain view of what could be hundreds of people. Someone would hear gunshots. The lower room, where Steve was standing now, was likely to be soundproofed, but if he screamed on deck, someone could very well hear him.

But if no one did, if the man was armed, if Steve getting the drop on him wasn’t enough…

Steve imagined his own body being fished out of the Hudson River, though it was probably fairer to assume that they would dump him in the Bay. Bodies could take weeks to surface. He hadn’t said enough to Gail to make the case. He was keenly aware, too, how many enemies he had. What could be proven?

It wasn’t only his own life on the line.

If he died, Steve had no doubt that Tony Stark would, too.

For a moment, he considered his opportunities, and, finding nothing better, he formulated a plan; get out on top of the yacht, where he could get reception. Dial 911 immediately (he pulled up the number, once more, on his phone, ready to call) and make enough to a fuss to make sure they were being watched. Keep the man engaged. Cornered men, Steve knew, could be dangerous, and he liked his chances better than Tony’s.

His heart pounding him his ears, he went to open the door and found it locked.

It had opened for him when he had entered. With a sinking feeling, Steve realized it locked from the outside. He should have know that would be the case.

For a moment, Steve thought he had felt his own stomach lurch, but then realized that the yacht was moving. The blinds were drawn tightly on the windows. Steve considered pulling them up and banging on the glass, but he knew the chances anyone would see, let alone that anyone would recognize the distress call, were slim to none.

His heart beating in his ears so loudly that he worried about missing footsteps above, Steve reached once more for the light switch.

He would have to talk to Tony Stark, see what the designer knew about the regular movements of the boat. Steve took a few steadying breaths and wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans. The air was stale. The room was already starting to feel oppressive, claustrophobic, the low ceiling and flat furniture giving it the air of a prison cell, the hanging disco ball a taunting touch. Steve tried to imagine the mental state of someone who had spent five weeks trapped in here, chained to the stripper pole in the center of the room, and grimaced.

Before he had the time to think better of it, he crossed the room in a few long-legged strides and knelt by the chained man. Up close, he could smell sweat and the faint, irony scent of old blood. Likely woken by his footfalls and the movement of the boat, Stark was already shifting, trying awkwardly to right himself with his elbows.

“Please, don’t scream,” Steve said, and pulled the dark hood off his face.

Tony Stark’s black hair clung to his forehead, overlong and sweaty. A yellowing bruise look up most of the left side of his face. His lips were chapped, dried blood clinging to the corner of his mouth. As the light hit the designer’s face, Steve watched his over dilated pupils narrow into tiny black pin points. His gaze focused, finally, on Steve. He looked confused.

“Who are you?” Tony Stark’s voice retained a sort of self-assuredness, a bossiness, even now.

“Steve. Steve Rogers. Private detective. I was trying to find you, and I got locked in.”

Tony stared at him, as though trying to process the information. Steve wondered if he was drugged. Steve wondered if there was head trauma. When he spoke, though, his voice was clear, focused. “Who has hired you? Thor?”

“Uhh, no,” Steve said, “your father. I don’t think he intended for me to actually find you.”

Stark blinked. His expression, taken aback, mirrored that of his brother in the cafe only hours earlier. After a moment, he shifted his weight again, using the pole to try to steady himself.

“Uncuff me,” he said, his voice brimming with confidence, “let me go. You’ve got to know what kind of trouble you’ll be in if you’re an accomplice once the police get here.”

He was bluffing, and Steve felt desperately bad for him; he knew that, after five weeks, he probably wasn’t expecting anyone to come and find him.

“Where are the keys?” He asked, glancing around the sparsely furnished room.

“Why,” Stark’s voice was level, but Steve thought he heard a note of hysteria somewhere in it, “do you think I would know that? You’re the one who works for…”

He let his voice trail off.

Steve shrugged matter of factly, “Not anymore, probably.”

He could feel Tony’s eyes on his back as he made his way over to the counters, checking for any drawers or compartments and finding none. The seats, similarly, did not contain any.

“Try the bathroom,” Tony suggested.

“Bathroom?” Steve spun around on the spot, feeling stupid when he realized he’d missed a second door to his left.

The bathroom was unlocked. It was a smaller, even more claustrophobic room, bringing airplane bathrooms to Steve’s mind. A bucket and a still-wet black rag, the same material as the hood Tony had worn, stood in the corner in front of the toilet. Steve hoped it was for cleaning purposes.

The drawers did not pull out.

“Nothing here. Are those standard police handcuffs?”

“Yes— no!” Tony laughed, humorless and dry. He sounded almost scandalized. “I can’t see them, can I? What do you want here?”

Steve reached into his pocket for his wallet.

“Lean forward,” He pulled out a paper clip and knelt back by Tony, who stiffened.

“What are you doing?”

“Gonna try to pick this. Standard issue, it seems. No bother.”

It seemed hard for him to raise his hands, and Steve wondered if it was an injury or the amount of time he’d spent in the strained position. He put one hand under the cuffs, urging Tony’s linked hands up, and slid a knee under them to keep them steady.

He wasn’t exactly practiced at picking locks — he knew the theory, but it had been far too long since he’d practiced — and Tony’s suggestions, which included gems like “alright, push it in,” and “turn counterclockwise, what way are you turning?” indicated that his knowledge of the process on about the same level.

“Shh, let me focus,” Steve hissed, as the paper clip once again failed to catch.

“There’s a double lock,” Tony said, his voice thin with annoyance and something that could be pain, “you need to catch it and turn—“

“Shut up, stop moving, I know.”

“Lovely lot my old man’s been hiring these days…”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” The single strand side of the cuff finally slid free from the lock. Tony, who had been hanging by the chain, slipped forward and would have fallen if Steve hadn’t caught him by the shoulder.

The designer was breathing heavily, his forehead sweaty once more, though he really hadn’t exerted himself. Since he was shirtless, Steve’s hand had fallen on top of bare skin, cool and clammy to the touch.

“See,” he muttered, after a moment, “told you had to catch it.”

“I’d be lost without you,” Steve replied, his voice brimming with sarcasm, “truly, what would I do.”

Tony rubbed at his wrists. Steve listened for footsteps above them. Nothing.

“Help me up,” Tony said, with the same undertone of bossiness — no please or thank you. Steve supposed he’d earned the right to be crabby.

He stood himself, and offered the other man a hand, steadying him with an arm around the shoulders when that wasn’t enough. To his surprise, Tony leaned heavily on him, something of the same faked confidence about the gesture.

“Bathroom.” he told him. “Just shove me in and shut the door, there’s not enough space in there to fall over.”

Steve eyed him uncertainly. “You sure?”

“Jesus, who do you think you—yes, yes, I’m sure.”

Steve guided Tony into the bathroom, letting him lean against the sink. It was Tony, and not Steve, who shut the door.

Steve sat down on one of the low, plush benches. For a while, he could hear the water running. The toilet flushed. More water ran. Tony coughed several times, and opened door, looking a little more human than he had before. His face was wet, and, still wearing only the swim trunks, he was shivering.

Steve pulled his leather jacket off and offered it over. Again, Tony didn’t thank him, but he didn’t turn it down, either.

“Jesus,” he said, again, swaying slightly on his feet, “I need a drink. Pretty sure I went though the seven stages of withdrawal in here.”

He doubled over on himself slightly and breathed though his hands, folded palm to palm as though in prayer. Steve listened for any movement upstairs, hoping the flush of the toilet wouldn’t have been audible.

“Look, I’d love to give you a minute,” he said, “but we’ve kind of got to get a move on.”

Tony glanced up at him with barely disguised suspicion. Even pale and bruised, his face bare and worn down, he retained the same sort of unconventional, magnetic beauty that Steve had picked up on in the interviews. Steve felt seen, and there was something both validating and uncomfortable about the feeling.

“I want to know who you are and how you’ve found me.” Tony said, with the uncompromising tone of a man in charge, and Steve found that he had no choice but to start from the beginning.


	7. tony stark, part II

“Your father hired me about a week ago,” Steve started, “he played the role well; at first, I didn’t realize he was leading me any particular way. He gave me a big stack of papers about Thor Golmen, but I didn’t think much of it. I realized he’d been back at your place. I found him, and your ex fiancée.”

Tony sighed, something grumbly about the sound. “Talked to her, did you?”

“Yeah. And to the butler, and your brother. Looked through your papers. The, um— the dresses and the frills and all.”

Tony looked amused. Steve couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t make him sound stupid but tried anyways. “I liked them.”

“You don’t look like the type.” The designer’s eyes rowed over Steve’s body, appraising, lingering. This wasn’t the time. This wasn’t, and couldn’t be, anything. Steve, Steve felt uncomfortably hot under the scrutiny, the desire to be seen mixing with guilt and something that could have been anger.

He hoped he wasn’t red. He felt red. “Not like that.”

“Yeah, darling, sure thing.” Tony didn’t sound fussed. “Go on about the case, now.”

“I was. I, uh— well. It didn’t take long to get the sense there were some family secrets. Neither your brother nor your father would tell me anything about why you left, why he had kicked Gregory from the company, or why you’d decided to drop in after all that time. Your fiancée—“

“Ex-fiancée.”

“Your ex was also overly worried about the family. I got the feeling she was lying about a lot of things, mind you, but I didn’t think she was faking her interest in who had hired me or what you’d returned for. Golmen had a lot of opinions about them, as well.

“Everyone was interested in something you had, though I wasn’t sure what. Your family searched your office and your apartment. Golmen had turned up at your place but couldn’t get in. He mentioned to me that he’d found the doors unlocked. Considering the timing of the family visit, I thought it might have had something to do with it.”

“Your butler told me he got two calls from you the day you disappeared, and—“

“That’s not right,” Tony interrupted, “I only called him once.”

“I know,” Steve said, “the second call didn’t make sense. You were talking about going to Romanov’s later that evening to Thor. Mr. Jarvis told me you called to check your schedule. Either someone had imitated you perfectly on the call, which I thought was weird, considering how well your butler knew you, or…”

“Or it had been Greg that called,” Tony said.

“Yeah, exactly. But you lied too. You said you were gonna go to the beach.” Steve glanced down at his notebook, which he’d pulled out to reference his notes, “but you told Golmen you were going to the meeting. And you told Golmen that everything about Romanov was gonna come out that night. So what gives?”

Tony stared at him, silent. Briefly, some thought flashed on his face, some clear desire to speak, but it was gone as fast as it had come.

“I can tell you what I think happened,” Steve offered. “I think you were planning to disappear. You tell Golmen you’d give him some kind of information at the meeting. You say you were going to confront Romanov that night — because something is definitely up with her, even if I can’t say I know what it is— and you’d only just come back from your father’s party. I’m guessing it wasn’t a social visit.”

Tony shifted, crossing his legs. Steve could see goosebumps climbing up his bare calves.

“I’m guessing you took something then. Something that looks bad for them. Proof of criminal actions, maybe. You took it, you got home. You realized exactly how screwed you were. You dad killed one woman already, didn’t he? Josey?”

The designer glanced up sharply, “Found that out, did you?”

“It wasn’t hard. Your butler just about spelled it out for me that something was off about it.” Steve thought he could hear footsteps upstairs. He stopped talking, gave it thirty seconds, and when any sound failed to come, he continued, “They were keeping you alive because they feared they wouldn’t have any hope finding it otherwise. They must have hired me hoping I could find whatever it was that you had, or find out what Golmen knew. Your father gave me a lot of information about him. God, though, that’s arrogant.

“I thought for a while you ran off and they were looking for whatever it was that you had. But the call didn’t make sense. And it didn’t make sense that nothing had come out about your family, that you’d never met Romanov. I’m guessing they intercepted your cab. Your father seems like the kind of person to be able to pull that off. They wanted to know where you hid whatever it had been that you’d taken. And after that…”

Steve motioned to the swim trunks, “I’m guessing they were gonna dump you in the bay. Neat little conclusion, if you were found. Must have gone swimming after all.” 

After a short hesitation, Tony nodded.

“Why did they stop torturing you?” Steve asked, bluntly.

The designer started. For a moment, he looked almost offended, “Excuse me?”

“You told them something. Nothing on you is recent. Not the cuts, not the bruises…”

Something ugly flitted over Tony’s face. His shoulders tensed, his hands forming fists. For a moment, Steve thought he was about to hit him.

Instead, he took one deep breath, and then another, clearly forcing the anger and upset down. “They didn’t stop. Dear old dad told them to stop leaving evidence.”

Steve remembered the bucket and the rag in the bathroom. Not for cleaning, then. “Ah.”

For a few moments, both of them were silent, Steve thinking to give Tony time to calm down before he moved on to his own questions. It was Tony, though, that spoke first.

He sounded tired, his voice drained of the inflections it had held before. “So, how does that bring us here?”

“What?”

“You thought they must have intercepted my cab. Then what?”

“Gave your brother a false warning. Figured he’d be involved. Got spooked and I trailed him back here. Decided to do a lil trespassing, and…” slightly embarrassed, Steve motioned to the door, “it locks from the outside.”

Tony stared at him, disbelief fading into amusement, “You know, for someone who’s clearly smart, you’re kind of dumb as fuck.”

“Laugh it up, Einstein.” Steve stood, crossing the room to try the door again. “Does he normally take the boat around? You feel a lot of movement? I’m worried I spooked him.”

“I don’t know. The boat… has moved, certainly. I couldn’t tell you when.” Tony kicked at the discarded blindfold with one bare foot, something vindictive about the movement. His toenails were a mess, Steve noticed, and thought back to the delicate little foot Romanov had placed in his lap. “They didn’t exactly want me to be able to keep track of time.”

“I could try to kick down the door,” Steve said, “then it’s us versus whatever guy’s up here. Do you know who that is?”

“Yeah, figure I do. Big guy? Bright purple jacket?”

“I think so.”

“Yeah, we’ve—“ Tony gestured down at the bruises his ribs, grimacing, “we’ve met. He’s got a gun. I tried to get it off him. Didn’t go well for me.”

“Ah.”

Steve frowned at the door, thinking. “He’ll come down to feed you eventually. Or ask questions. Something like this.”

“Yeah.” Tony said. He was thinking, Steve could see, the same thing that the detective himself was, “it’s better for us to have the element of surprise, isn’t it? Best not to give him the time to get that gun out.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, “Which means we either manage to get the door down without making any noise, which is damn near impossible, or we wait for him to come down and I ambush him.”

“You’re a big guy, too,” Tony observed thoughtfully, turning to face him. His eyes lingered on Steve’s upper arms, “trained?”

“Yeah.” Steve didn’t elaborate, but he did flex a little, on sheer impulse.

Even as tired and upset as he was, Tony gave a low, appreciative wolf-whistle. “Yeah, maybe we’ve got a chance. I can hear them coming, most of the time. Footsteps. So as long as we’re quiet…”

“Behind the door or in the bathroom, do you think?” Steve asked.

“He’ll shut the door immediately. Stand in the bathroom.”

“Alright.” Steve reached for the handcuffs he’d taken off the designer, “we’ll have to…”

“You know, normally people take me to dinner before those come out.”

Again, guilt twisted heavy in Steve’s gut. Tony flirted easily, effortlessly; Steve was starting to get the feeling he didn’t mean anything by it. It was the fact that he was enjoying the attention, the pang of satisfaction that he had felt with Tony’s eyes on his arms, that was troubling him. _People could want you,_ it seemed to say, _men could want you, if you’ll only allow yourself to be what she’d thought you are._

Wouldn’t anyone want the attention? Wouldn’t anyone like feeling desirable? It wasn’t anything. It couldn’t be. Wouldn’t anyone, realistically speaking, want Tony Stark?

“I doubt he’ll come down here while the boat is still moving,” Tony said. Steve could see the turn his thoughts had taken; he was eyeing the stripper pole with obvious dread.

“You willing to bet our advantage on that?” Steve asked, gruffly. Spurred to action by his own words, he stood, putting an arm on Tony’s shoulder and herding him back towards the center of the room.

Tony didn’t resist.

He steadied himself with one hand on Steve’s lower arm, leaning on him more heavily as the detective guided him down. Steve let him get as comfortable as he could on the floor, and took his jacket back when Tony offered it. The same goosebumps he’d seen earlier now spotted Tony’s arms, and Steve wondered if he’s simply been cold.

“Sorry, chum,” he said, wishing he’d called the police in the park, or had the mind to leave the door open, “I’ll keep these loose, here. Can you get out of that?”

Tony, two shades paler than he’d been on the benches, tried the newly re-locked cuffs. It took some wriggling, but he slipped his wrist in and then back out again twice, and Steve was satisfied. He bowed his head and let Steve put the hood back on, and Steve pretended not to hear the change in his breathing.

After a moment’s hesitation, inwardly resenting the touchy-feelingness of it all, Steve sat down on the ground next to him. “Got used to being alone here, didncha?”

He couldn’t see Tony’s face behind the hood, but he could imagine the silence was probably skeptical. With a faint feeling of discomfort — this wasn’t exactly his forte — he continued, “Just, uh— I’ll be here, in the bathroom. Hear you if you speak up. Thought you oughtta know.”

After a moment, Tony leaned over, letting his shoulder brush against Steve’s shoulder. Steve had the feeling that, despite all the earlier touchiness, this was the first time he was showing any real vulnerability.

Then, still silent, he moved away again, and the moment was gone so quickly that Steve wondered if he had imagined it. He rose, turned off the lights, and retreated into the bathroom, keeping the door open a crack. The quiet that followed was tense, expectant.

Tony broke it. His voice was quieter than before, somehow subdued. “God, do I not want you to be my old man’s idea of an advanced interrogation technique.”

Steve grimaced sympathetically. The clear suspicion with which Tony had regarded him and the way in which he’d avoided giving him any information were starting to make sense.“That musta been one hell of a way to grow up.”

“This isn’t even the worst— well, it’s the worst thing he did to _me_ , but…” He laughed, a dry humorless sound, meant to break up the silence more than to convey emotion of any kind. “It’s the power. You realize you’ve got the money and the brains to get away with murder and at that point, what’s stopping you?”

“You.” Steve suggested.

“What?” Tony sounded as though Steve had caught him slightly off balance.

“You were going to stop him.”

The handcuffs clinked against the metal pole. A long pause followed, and Tony’s voice was darker when he spoke, heavy with some feeling Steve couldn’t put a finger on, “Took me fifteen damn years. I told myself there was no one left back there to make him angry. I told myself he was getting old. Wouldn’t he want a quiet retirement? And Greg…”

Footsteps sounded from somewhere above them. Tony stopped talking. Steve reached for the door. He counted as the silence dragged on. Ten seconds, nothing. Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.

“Greg?” He prompted.

“I didn’t think Greg would do that,” Tony admitted, quietly, “I don’t know why.”

For a moment, Steve considered telling him about his own brother, and everything he hadn’t expect Dougie to do, every fight and disappointment, every single time Steve had unquestioningly paid bail or taken the blame, the slow, winding way down to the bitter end. He had never told the story before; some people knew, and other people didn’t, and he’d had never bothered to change it. He doubted it would be comforting, though there was something said in favor of being understood.

Something creaked above them. The room itself had been soundproofed, but, sitting in the bathroom as he was, Steve realized he could hear a voice upstairs. There was a vent just over the toilet, thin enough that Steve wouldn’t be able to even fit his head through, but quite enough to carry sound.

Wordlessly, Steve shut the door to the bathroom and climbed on top of the toilet to listen, hunched over awkwardly in the small space.

The guard, he realized quickly, wasn’t alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the amount of chapters planned keeps getting longer, but it's because some scenes have been dragging out; i'm not deviating from the plan. we'll be wrapped up in ten or eleven chapters, i pinky promise. 
> 
> big big amounts of love to everyone who's been commenting, i get such a huge rush of dopamine every time ;o; .  
> i'll go through and reply to everyone very soon, but know i read them and love all of you. 
> 
> up next: read and find out


	8. gregory stark, pt II

“It’s a waste,” There was air of anxiety to the voice upstairs. Having just spoken to Tony, Steve recognized it immediately; this was the twin, “there’s still avenues we ought to be taking. Five weeks is nothing, really, if you consider—”

A pause. Whoever he was talking to wasn’t audible; Steve wondered if he was on the phone.

“… No, I understand.”

Another pause.

“I would not. If there’s that kind of risk…”

The ceiling squeaked. Steve wondered if Gregory was pacing.

His voice was smaller as he spoke, more distant. Steve’s bumped his head hard against the metal vent as he lurched up to hear. Ow. Fuck’s sake. “Yes, sir. I’ll see what I can get tonight, and I’ll end it.”

Something creaked. Steve imagined, without evidence, that Gregory had sat down.

“Tomorrow, then. Goodbye.” Probably on his mobile, then. Gregory’s voice changed as he spoke again, taking on a shrill, commanding air.

“Get over here. We’ll come out on the water tonight. Finish it.”

Another voice spoke now, lower in pitch and distant. Steve strained to hear it, catching only the last few words, “… storming now again.”

The floor creaked. Gregory, too, was getting further from the vent. His next few words were lost in the sound of the floorboards, “… stable. We can take it. Last chance for the both of us to…”

Steve heard a faint thud that could have been a door closing, and then nothing else.

He scowled, quickly re-calculating. Gregory Stark didn’t scare him when it came to hand-to-hand combat, but it was quite likely he was armed, and nearly a certainty he would scream for the guard if he saw anything. Both of these facts made him dangerous.

“Tony,” he started, cracking open the door, “Your—“

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Knowing how little time it took to cross downstairs, Steve shut the door, leaving only the barest crack. He couldn’t afford to sacrifice the element of surprise.

The door opened and closed. Shoes clicked on the tile floor.

Steve’s stomach twisted. He knew, rationally, to wait, to let the whoever had entered relax get distracted. He knew, rationally, that Tony wasn’t likely to be in danger of immediate death. But still— but still.

Steve heard Tony’s sharp inhale.

“So,” said Gregory Stark, from somewhere very close to them, “let’s face it. This stunt of yours has gone on far too long, kid.”

“Twenty minutes, and I seem to recall being the only one to ever move out,” Tony pointed out, and Steve had the feeling the cheer in his voice wasn’t fooling anyone, “you don’t have ‘kid’ privileges, here.”

Something clinked, regularly, metal against metal.

Greg continued as though he’d never spoken, “Dad doesn’t like this any more than you do. None of us want this, you know. You can tell us where you put it and you’ll be back on solid land tomorrow morning, tell all the talk show circuits about your awful time getting lost at sea.”

Steve pushed the door open slightly to gain a better view of the room. Greg was standing with his back turned to the bathroom door. Tony was refusing to look his direction. Steve saw the source of the clinking; Tony’s handcuffed hands were shaking, the chain hitting the pole.

“The pre-recorded ones, of course,” Greg was saying, “and you’ll come back to stay with family to recuperate…”

“You do realize I’d rather die, right?” Tony asked.

Steve caught the glimpse of metal on Greg’s belt.

“We can arrange that, too,” Greg said, and Steve stepped fluidly out of the bathroom behind him, crossed the room in two long strides, and pulled his gun out of the holster.

Time, Steve had noticed long ago, worked differently when you were pointing a gun at someone. A sense of hyperawareness hit him hard, muting and sharpening everything at the same time. Steve registered as waves of emotion hit the faces of the two men near him — surprise, first, for Gregory, muted with disbelief; relief crashing hard on Tony’s face; anger hardening Greg’s features, helpless and wild; and, finally, a trained, set blankness on of the twins.

Tony slipped out of the handcuffs so quickly that Steve thought he must have been halfway out already and stood.

“Hands up,” Steve barked, “if you try to scream I’m going to shoot.”

Greg raised his hands. A look of amusement came over his face that didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, I did tell dear old dad to hire someone internally, but here we are. Is there someone else that’s paying you? What did he promise you?”

“Nothing,” Steve said, “I’m doing this because out of the goodness of my little heart. Get down on your knees.”

Greg got down on his knees. “And how much is that worth to you? Couple hundred thousand? A million, maybe?”

Tony scoffed nervously. Steve rolled his eyes and motioned to the handcuffs, which Tony was still holding. “Search him for the keys and cuff him to the pole, would you?”

“See, he can think for himself. Dad’s taste in men has been improving lately.” Tony paused, and then wrinkled his nose in an over-exaggerated way, sticking his tongue out slightly in disgust. “Wait, gross. Forget I said anything. I’m probably concussed.”

“You’re fine,” Steve grumbled, “search.”

Tony did, finding the keys tucked away in Greg’s back pocket. They handcuffed him to the pole, sitting the same way that Tony had been, and Steve knelt to pat him down for other weapons. Nothing, though he did take out his wallet and chuck it across the room, just in case there was something inside he could use to pick the lock.

“We’re going to charge you with trespassing,” Gregory threatened, ridiculously, “you had no right to come into our family life and—“

Tony picked up the black hood and gagged him with it, and then turned to Steve.

“Give me your jacket.”

“Wh—“

“Your jacket, darling, don’t make me repeat myself.”

Steve took it off and handed it over. Tony donned it with a sigh of relief. He was shivering. “Got a feeling I might need steady hands for whatever’s coming up.”

“You sound like him,” Steve said, “same build, just about.”

Tony stared at him like he was stupid. “Yeah? We’re twins.”

“But when we go upstairs, if you could imitate…”

“I don’t know if you missed it, big guy, but he’s blond.”

Steve crossed the room and pulled up the curtain. “It’s dark outside. It’s raining. If he’s on the top part of the boat…”

“That’s a big if. Especially if it’s raining. I’d bet you there’s lights up there, too.”

Steve nodded, conceding the point. “I’ll come up first, then. Stay behind me. If I go down, uhh. Well, you’re probably fucked. But take your brother’s phone and try calling the police from the stairs. Barricade the door in here after that. Got me?”

“Yeah.” Something that could have been guilt flashed over Tony’s face, “I could give you a million dollars, so you don’t feel bad missing out on what he would have been offer—“

“Oh, get over yourself,” Steve said, and unlocked the door.

Part of him, the part that never left the active war zone where he’d first picked up most the survival instincts, wanted to shoot on sight. Another part of him, more human, protested. No one had to die tonight, he thought, not with any amount of luck.

He could hear Tony shuffling behind him on the stairs, gestured for him to wait and let him clear the room, and propelled himself gun-first into the little sitting area.

It was empty. Same big round coffee table. Same map of the world. Same wall-mounted TV. Gregory’s wet trench coat hanging heavy on the back of one of the armchairs. A gun, disassembled, on the table.

No doors where anyone could have gone.

“Clear,” he called back to Tony, his voice barely above a whisper. The designer climbed out behind him, winded by the stairs. Steve wondered how long it had been since he had eaten anything, wondered how badly the weeks in captivity had exhausted him.

“I’m gonna check upstairs. It’s raining bad, and it’s dark; visibility is gonna be low. Stay down here. I don’t want you caught up with it.”

He could feel the yacht rocking heavily on the waves. As unsteady as he was, Steve as worried about Tony slipping and falling as anything else. He gestured to the gun. “Do you know how to shoot?”

Wordlessly, Tony picked up and assembled it smoothly with the air of a man who knew what he was doing. “Had time to learn, thanks.”

“I’m gonna hope that’s the guard’s,” Steve said, “would make things easy on us.”

With that, his adrenaline spiking in anticipation, he climbed up the final set of stairs onto the open-air top part of the yacht.

As Tony had predicted, there were lights on. It was raining badly; despite standing under cover on the boat, Steve found himself getting soaked within moments. He realized that he was at a disadvantage, standing directly under the source of the light, surrounded in thick darkness; he saw no one.

As far as he could tell by the distance of the lights of the city, they were out on the bay. The wind around him was so loud that he couldn’t hear much of anything at all, and heavy drops of rain kept hitting his eyes, his face. Steve thought he someone move to his left, and turned around sharply, gun pointed.

Nothing but waves.

“WH— there?“

Right behind him, someone had shouted. Steve turned, blinking hard to see.

His gun glinted under the light, and he knew his face, too, would be illuminated. He caught sight of the silhouette of a man only some ten feet away, and couldn’t tell apart what he was doing or what he had in his hands.

“Hands up!” Steve yelled, “Hands up!”

Surrounded the noise, Steve barely heard the other man’s gunshot before he felt it. Pain bloomed in his ribs, and the force of it drove him back. He slipped on the water, disoriented, and fell hard on his ass by the stairs.

For a moment, his vision went black. Pushing through pain, he tried to draw air into his lungs, tried to spit out the water that was over his face, his eyes, his mouth, tried to push himself up to and rejoin the fight, tried to sit up—

As soon as he tried to pull himself up, stab of pain nearly as sharp as the first one forced him down. Panic, familiar and unwanted, was threatening to overtake him. He became aware, keenly, of exactly how much he did not want to die.

Jesus, Rogers. Get it together. Head in the game. Are you a man or what? Are you a fucking man, Steve, or what?

It was his father’s voice, he realized, that he was hearing. He thought he didn’t want to hear his father’s voice right now, not as the last thing he heard.

A second gunshot sounded near him, jolting him out of his distracted self-pity. The lights flickered. The boat rocked, wildly, on the waves. The guard was coming closer, Steve was sure. His grip on his gun tightened, and, blindly, he prepared to take aim at anyone above him.

Another figure was rushing out of the light from downstairs. Steve’s finger tightened for a moment on the trigger, ready to fire, and then, horrified, drew back.

“Tony!” Steve shouted, desperate and in pain. He was finding it hard to breathe in deep enough to shout. His lungs contracted painfully whenever he tried to inhale. He was dizzy just from the effort of it, and he felt hot blood mixing with cold water on the front of his shirt. “Get back! He’s armed!”

He didn’t know if Tony had not heard him or had chosen to ignore him. Faster than Steve kept track of, then, the designer raised his own gun and shot twice at the guard.

Even through the howling wind, Steve thought he heard a splash.

He struggled, again, to sit up, his elbows slipping on the puddles below him. The world folded in and out. He became aware that someone had knelt by him. There was blood in his mouth. Cold wet fingers were prying his gun out of his hand.

Steve closed his eyes and let the world shrink and fold out away from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UP NEXT: people talk about their feelings. The mystery is resolved. Oh, and gun shot wounds, I guess.


	9. steve rogers, pt I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: there are some semi-graphic descriptions of injury & choking in this chapter. They’re not crazy bad, but definitely unpleasant if you’re sensitive to this sort of thing.

Steve wasn’t out for a long time. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware that that was a good thing. He knew how likely it was that if he dropped off now, he wouldn’t wake up again.

Tony had heaved him up by the shoulders and was struggling to try to get his bulk down the stairs, swaying precariously backwards. Steve caught the railing with his hand and leaned heavily on the wall. His chest hurt, and his mouth was bloody.

“Lemme come down,” he said, pushing lightly at the designer, “lemme down, lemme do this.”

Tony let him down, and he slid down the wall. One by one, he scooted down the steps on his ass, feeling somewhat like a child. Tony stepped around him to shut the door.

Gingerly, Steve lowered himself to lay on the floor. His shirt was so wet that it was hard to tell how much he had been bleeding, and, shakily, he started undoing the buttons to have a better look. His hands kept slipping.

“There’s no reception,” Tony said, sitting down on the floor next to him. “I don’t know if it’s the weather or wherever we are.”

“Lovely,” Steve managed, through gritted teeth. His hand slipped again. He felt on the verge of simply ripping the button off.

Tony’s hand, still damp and cold, closed around his wrist. Steve let him pull his hand down set it down on the floor.

“Just let me do it,” he said, with the same undertone of slightly annoyed bossiness, and undid Steve’s shirt, pulling it back. For a moment, he stopped, feeling up the coarse fabric, “where’d you get this, Target?”

The background hum of pain was slowing down his reaction time. Steve blinked, taken aback, “Uh. Walmart.”

Tony tutted and turned his attention back to the bullet wound. “I don’t think I ought to be pulling that out. That’s probably—“

He traced a finger down Steve’s ribs, as though trying to ascertain by touch exactly where his vital organs would be. Steve shivered. “Over your lung, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. By the way ‘m feeling about it, ’s definitely hit a lung.” Steve agreed. “Still bleeding?”

Tony frowned down at the wound. “Not really, no.”

“Probably best not to bother it ‘till we can get the paramedics here, then.” Steve said, with confidence he didn’t feel.

“I could try to steer,” Tony said, “but I don’t even know what direction home is. Can’t see much of anything back here.”

It took Steve a good three or four seconds to process his words. It was hard to feel fully present.

“The wheel decorative?” He asked. 

“No idea. But there’s got to be a way to steer.”

Tony stood. Steve thought he must be leaving to go steer, and closed his eyes. The floor felt like it was sucking him in, imposing a sort of weightlessness on him. Each rock of the boat solidified that impression. It wouldn’t be so bad to take a nap.

Glass clinked. Steve could feel himself rising, leaving the pain on the floor, sharp and intense like a rock in his shoe, heavy as a rock. Tony must be steering.

Something smelled sharply of alcohol. Don’t drink and drive, Steve said, or maybe wanted to say, or maybe imagined himself saying. Tony hand returned to his skin, just over his forehead. He liked this. He liked being touched. He’d always liked being touched.

The pain that came, then, was so intense and sharp it woke Steve at work. His eyes watered, and he gasped, panting, staring at Tony’s impassive face with betrayal.

“For disinfectant,” he said, holding up the bottle of liquor he’d picked up.

“Jesus fuck,” said Steve, coming back down. He was embarrassed to realize how wet his eyes were. “Jesus fuck.”

For a few moments, he struggled to steady his breathing.

“Don’t drift off on me,” Tony said, “seriously, if you die, I’m not going to forgive myself, and my therapist has got it made for the next fifty years as it stands.”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve scrunched up his nose, frowning deeply, “wouldn’t be your fault.”

“Offer for a million dollars still stands.”

Exhausted, the detective stayed silent. Tony poked him hard in the side with one sharp nail, “Million dollars and a blowjob.”

Steve turned on his side and spat blood onto the tile, coughing to clear his throat.

“You don’t have to be rude about it,” Tony said, his concern shining through his words. “Here, sit up a little, I don’t want to watch you choke on blood.”

The designer glanced up and around the room, scowling. His eyes, bright and alert with worry, reminded Steve of the eyes of a Jack Russell on the prowl. “No pillows on the couches, really?”

“Your place didn’t.” Steve was finding it hard to speak, having to swallow down blood every other word. “Have any either.”

“Yeah, I’m not big on clutter.” Tony shifted, again, so that he was kneeling with his calves flat against this thighs, sitting on his heels. “Alright, big guy, you’re coming up.”

He didn’t give Steve time to protest, taking him under the arms and pulling him up do that his head and shoulders were laying on Tony’s lap. Steve hated to admit that he immediately found it easier to breathe.

The pain in his ribs pounded in and out, uncomfortably heavy. He coughed, again. Tony picked up Steve’s hand and used the sleeve of his button up to wipe his mouth, which Steve supposed was certainly a way to do things.

“Talk to me,” Tony said, “stay awake. What’re you gonna do when you come back to shore?”

Steve blinked, wondering if this was a trick question, “Hospital, pr’bly.”

“There’s no need to get smart with me.” The words were soft, playful. Steve liked these words.

“Gotta apologize—“ Steve swallowed heavily, “— to Gail. Sent her a dumbass text.”

“Is that your girlfriend? Wife?”

“Business partner.”Steve considered his words carefully, now. “Ex.”

“Ex business partner?” Tony asked, his tone suggesting this was kind of sad.

Steve shook his head. “Usta be engaged.”

“Ah.”

“It’d be kinda pathetic,” Steve admitted, hurrying through the words while he had the breath for them, “to die right now.”

He could feel Tony’s soft, cold fingers on his hairline. “Why’s that?”

“Never loved her the way she needed,” Steve shrugged, and then, pain shooting up his ribs, regretted it, “n’ver loved a woman the way she needed.”

He had to stop, then, and paused, breathing heavily, but, after a moment, found it within himself to go on, “She’s seein’ my best friend. Like the brother I never— n’ver had. ‘Cos my brother— God rest his soul, he was—“

Steve’s eyes were watering again. He told himself it was just the pain. He hadn’t cried over Dougie’s death in years.

“— good kid. Good kid, under it all. Let ‘im down, too.”

A short silence followed. Tony sighed, a short huffy noise half way to a laugh. His fingers were still toying with Steve’s short spiky hair, something carelessly touchy about the gesture.

“What’s so funny?” Steve asked.

“I just don’t know how I manage to collect so many tragically repressed basket cases.”

Steve took a moment to mull this over, and shook his head. “Don’t think I’m— don’t figure I’m a basket case, is all. If I get home—“

“ _When_ you get home, darling,” Tony cut in, severely, and Steve felt oddly touched.

A pleasant warmth was lapping at him in waves, leaving it hard for him to think, to focus. There was something he wanted to say. There was something important to say.

“Get home, yeah,” he agreed, no longer minding the warm blood making its way up his throat and to his lips, “gonna get home n’ I’m gonna stop thinking I can make it by faking it, y’know?”

If Tony answered him, he didn’t hear. Time seemed to have stopped having meaning; for a while, he drifted, toasty and half asleep, with the waves.

Something hard and cold pressed against his lips. Scorching liquid followed it. He coughed, choking on blood and liquor, and again opened his eyes to stare, betrayed, at Tony’s concerned white face.

“’S that for?” He managed, after a moment. Each word was now harder to choke out than before. Being awake seemed like a major downgrade from two moments ago.

“Don’t sleep,” Tony said, some note of desperation creeping into his voice. “You’re a good man. Don’t sleep, tell me something else.”

Steve coughed and gestured to his throat, shaking his head. After a few shuddering breaths, he forced out, “You talk.”

“Yeah, what about?” Tony asked. “Keep in mind I’m watching and I’ll pinch you if you pass out.”

“What.” Steve drew breath, again. It made a nasty, wet sound. “What. Happened.”

“Should have known you’d ask.” Tony was running his fingers in circles over Steve’s clammy forehead. Steve wondered if he knew he was doing it. “Well, it all started when I was born into this fucking family.”

Steve laughed, and regretted it when the pain hit.

“No, really. Growing up, I knew Dad was dangerous, but not… how much. He made weapons, you see. It’s an easy trade to… go astray in.” Tony paused, reminiscent. “It’s amazing how normal the worst of us look, in polite company. I never thought to question who my father’s clients were shopping for. Greg and I— well, we were bright. We were always bright. He taught us his trade early on. He wanted to leave the company to me, told me I had the heart for it. I still don’t know what he meant. I didn’t. I never had.”

Steve thought back to the childhood pictures he’d seen of the twins, tried to imagine what it must have been like for Tony. What must it have been like for Greg, hearing his brother favored to take on the company.

“We went to boarding school. When I was fourteen, I met Josey there. She— she was in a surprisingly similar situation to mine. I was so amazed, at fourteen, that there was someone like me out there. The trouble was, her father was a rival of my father’s. My dad told me straight away it couldn’t happen. I couldn’t talk to her.

“I knew my father was dangerous. I really, really didn’t know how much. I couldn’t imagine how far he would go, if pushed. We carried on in secret. We got bold. It’s easy to get bold when you’re fifteen with a private jet at your disposal. She would visit me here when my parents were gone. I would visit her. We were planning to get out, as soon as we could. We wanted to start our own company. We wanted to get married.”

Tony sighed, examining his ragged, overgrown fingernails.

“Jarvis told you what happened. My father caught us. He put her back home on a plane that was never meant to land. It crashed over an industrial building. Four people died, did you know? I used to try to tell myself that meant he hadn’t known. Used to think he wouldn’t have set himself up for that. But he could get away with anything. He didn’t give a shit.

“Deep down, I think I always knew. I got out of there as soon as I could. I bet my brother fifty dollars I’d never see Dad again, I was so sure of myself. I chose to do design because I had an eye for it, and because my dad would have hated it. There was little I did without the joy of knowing he’d die mad about it. I never looked back. Never wanted to go back. Not until…”

Steve blinked, blearily, and forced out, “Y’r ma’s funeral.”

“Yeah. I thought I’d come pay my respects. She… she never stopped him, but she was good to us, when she could be. She could be good to us. I never thought she might be in danger. Never thought he’d go there. Never saw her disagree with him. But when I came to the funeral…”

Some expression of deep pain came over Tony’s face. He scrunched his eyes and shook his head, blinking with wet, heavy eyelashes.

“Something was wrong. I knew something was wrong. I thought he’d done it. I called my dad the next morning. Spun a load of bull about how Mom’s death made me realize I wanted to reconnect with the family. I came back to Cali on his birthday. I mostly talked to Greg. He didn’t want to tell me much, but— but he’d loved Mom, too. He led me into the lab, showed me some of his suspicions about her death. After he was gone, I let myself back in and took everything I could, every proof I could find of their wrongdoings. He didn’t think I’d dare, I suppose. Paid dearly for it when Dad gave him the boot out of the company. Are you listening?”

“Jus’ resting my eyes.”

“Well, don’t do that.” Tony snapped his fingers several times in front of Steve’s face, and then rapped his knuckles lightly against his forehead. Steve blinked hard, a little overwhelmed by the noise, but kept his eyes open. “Story time’s only happening once. You got me?”

“Mm.”

“There’s a good man.” Tony paused, regrouping, “I learned something else, too. My ex — Natasha, remember her?”

Steve swallowed. “Mmhm.”

“We had broken up, by then. But she was— well, she was something else.” Tony paused, considering his words. “I mean, she was fun. She was hilarious. Whole lot brighter than she let on. Really amazing at shaping buttercream into photorealistic nipples — don’t give me that look, Steve, it’s art. But, y’know— I’d been away from my family for fifteen years, and she wouldn’t stop bringing them up. Lot of things she claimed were— well, I could never disprove anything, really. Something was off. By the time I’d figured out which business rival had hired her, we’d already been broken up for some months. I left it at that.”

“So,” Steve regretted speaking as soon as he had tried, but now Tony was looking at him expectably, and he pushed forward, “Wh’n she broke in…”

“I already knew, and I more or less expected it. She didn’t get anything. I upped security and prepared to release the files I had. It was— well, I was worried for my safety. Thor had connections, activists, politicians. I thought I could get the files through to him. I thought I could trust him get it out, and… go swimming and disappear for a couple months. Couple years. Couple decades, who knows. Let the necessary authorities handle things. Make sure I wasn’t coming back to be murdered myself. I had enough information for put a lot of very powerful people behind bars. And—“

Steve’s eyes were drifting shut. Tony poked him in the cheekbone, and, with a groan, he opened them again.

“ _And,_ Steve, I wanted to scream in Natasha’s face for lying to me and wasting my fucking time, I’ll be honest with you. But I never got the chance, because the cab I got into was driven by one of dear old Dad’s men.”

Steve stared at Tony through his eyelashes, trying to make out the expression on his face. He swallowed, coughed twice, and once more tried to speak up, “Where’d y’hide— the files.”

“I’ll tell you once we get off the yacht.” Tony said. “I’ll show you. There’s your incentive to make it.”

“Oh, a’right,” Steve said. It didn’t feel then that it mattered much one way or the other. Tony was still touching his face, and it was nice, Steve thought, to just let him. The rain was coming down hard, wind whooshing outside. If Steve had the energy to speak at any length, he’d point it out. Rain’s coming down hard, he would say, and maybe Tony would agree, and then—

And then what. Anything could happen, then.

Probably sensing Steve’s half-conscious frame of mind, Tony started talking again.

“Nice of you to show up,” he said, “heroic. Knight in shining fucking armor and all. Didn’t feel like something out of my life.”

He ran his hand over Steve’s forehead, his voice going so soft the detective had to strain to hear it. “So, don’t die, yeah? That’d be one way to bring me back down.”

Steve didn’t know if he answered or not. He raised a hand, feeling the urge to reached something, or to take something, but he lost track of it half way through and dropped it, heavily, back to his side. Tony was poking his face again, his voice distant and warped. Steve couldn’t find it in him to answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UP NEXT: this fic earns its E rating. Save a horse, ride a private detective.


	10. steve rogers, part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp, sorry to dump out two chapters on one day, but i thought it'd be cute to have this done on halloween.

Steve woke slowly, feeling like he was underwater. Had he fallen off the yacht? There had been— there had been people, eventually, pulling him off. There had been a stretcher. He hadn’t liked the bright lights. He had wanted to walk. They did not let him walk. He had passed out again. His chest and ribs had hurt.

They still hurt, but it felt distant, like it couldn’t touch him. He wasn’t fussed about it. His mouth was cotton-y, dry, and little specks of something dry clung to his eyelashes. It was halfway dark, the kind of dark that Steve found easy enough to see in once his eyes adjusted. Someone was breathing close to him, deep even breaths.

He turned his head to the side and caught a glimpse of red hair, the silhouette of a man. His thoughts felt miles behind his eyes; it took several seconds of staring to realize he was looking at Bucky’s face in profile, and that Gail was asleep in the chair in next to him, with her head tucked against his neck.

The yacht, the rain, the twins— all of it felt so distant that Steve wondered for a moment if he had dreamt it all. But he was at the hospital. The bullet wound in his shoulder was as real as anything.

It must have all happened. It must have all been real, and he must have done it in the end. He’d found Tony Stark, and alive at that.

Steve let himself feel a thrill of satisfaction at a job well down, and went back to sleep.

He didn’t wake up again until the morning. The light, now, was unpleasantly bright. Someone — a nurse — was fussing with a with one of the machines connected to the IV line in his arm. Bucky had gone, and Gail was standing nervously by the door, chewing her lip. Steve knew she must have been longing for a smoke.

“Gail?” He called out, at loss for what else there was to say, and she rushed around the nurse back to his side.

“Steve! Are you feeling alright?”

“Yeah, uh. Hunky dory.” Were it not for the gunshot wound, Steve would have shrugged. “You didn’t have to say here all night.”

She blinked, taken aback. Steve wasn’t sure if she was surprised he had seen her in the night, or surprised at what he had said.

“For a smart guy,” she told him, “you’re kind of dumb. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“As a matter of fact,” Steve replied, surprised into amusement, “someone has.”

The nurse, who had evidently accomplished whatever she wanted to accomplish, bumped into Bucky on her way out of the room. He was carrying roses, which ran counter, somehow, to everything Steve had ever known about his tastes in both flowers and gift giving.

He scoffed. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“Back in the land of the living, I see. Don’t flatter yourself, pal.” Bucky set the roses down on the table by the bed. They were red and lavender, framed at the bottom with some sort of smaller, whiter flower. They smelled nice, and Steve would never tell anyone that he thought this. “All you’re getting from me for the foreseeable future is shit.”

Steve raised an eyebrow, feeling like that was all that he needed to do to illustrate his point.”

Bucky sighed. “Shut up, you know what I mean. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. Peachy.” Steve leaned forward on his elbows, wincing a little at the pain that elicited. “Seriously, who are the roses from?”

“Mysterious benefactor,” drawled Bucky, sounding amused, “same one who paid for your hospital bills, I’d assume.”

“I had him check all of it over,” Gail said, “we’re not stupid. There’s plenty of people very upset with you right now.”

“It’s all out, then?” Steve asked.

“More than you can imagine, probably. Stark stole a lot of information, and…” Gail shrugged, “well, there are quite a few important people who won’t come out of this looking good.”

Steve glanced back at the flowers. A little crimson envelope, sealed with gold wax, was tucked in between the stems. Hoping it wasn’t full of anthrax, Steve plucked it out and opened it.

The paper was heavy in a way that reminded him of expensive water-color paper, the kind he never spent too long looking at, frivolous and unnecessary but, for some reason, ridiculously nice. Someone had sprayed the envelope with perfume, a warm, spicy scent with an undertone of earthy and masculine underneath. Steve, whose go-to smell was “soap,” felt the back of his neck warm up a little bit at the idea of someone else smelling it on him after this.

Still, he opened it. There was one small sliver of paper inside, the same bright crimson color as the envelope. The note was written in a familiar slanted half-curve:

> 212-970-4133
> 
> Let me know if you’re done faking it.
> 
> xoxo, T. S.

Steve crumpled the note up, shoving his hand under the blanket before either of them could see it. Gail raised an eyebrow at him.

“Nothing bad?”

“Just— Just a thank you note,” Steve managed, already straightening out the paper one-handed.

She didn’t look like she believed him, but she let it go.

He spent a week and some change in the hospital. His phone, along with his other belongings, was returned to him on the second day. He punched the number in and did not call.

On the fourth day of staring at his phone, the thought of finding a reason to call occurred to him. Considering he doubted Howard was paying him a penny, now, he could bill Tony for the time worked on the case.

Yeah, no.

No, that was a bad move.

Maybe he could express a polite interest in learning more about fashion, for the sake of the women in his life, and—

Steve pulled the note up again, already crumpled and re-straightened twice.

Was he done faking it? Had he meant it?

He didn’t remember everything he had told Tony back on the yacht, when he’d thought he might never see shore again, but he had the feeling he’d said quite enough to give him an accurate impression of things. Guilt tightened his throat, and he shoved the note and the phone both into his bedside drawer, unable to bear them any longer.

He left the hospital six days later without calling Tony.

He was at the office when he realized that he had lost the note and the phone number, and he couldn’t help the stab of panic, of fear. He’d saved the envelope, which was quickly losing its smell. Empty, it felt empty.

Wow. He should have done poetry.

It was that night that he’d gotten on his motorbike and made his way to Hudson Square. Tony had left the first move (second move?) to him, he reasoned, and thus he couldn’t be expected to have called ahead or shown up at a reasonable time.

He tried the office first.

The floor was nearly the same as he had remembered it. Two security guards had been installed at the doors. They were still on duty, which Steve assumed meant he’d guessed correctly. 

The lights were on in the inner office, which was obscured by the blinds, and dimmed in the sitting area. Steve gave his name and business (“uh, personal”) to one of the guards and settled in to wait on one of the brightly colored armchairs.

He didn’t have to wait long. The guard went into the office. A small, short woman with her shiny black hair in a pixie cut and and a glimmering striped dress left the office. The guard, who had held the door open for her, beckoned Steve inside.

Steve, who expected to have more time to think things over or flee, froze up. A second too long passed. He heard a familiar voice ask a question from inside the room with an air of concern.

He was being weird. Pushed forward by embarrassment more than anything else, Steve stood out of his chair and walked into the office.

Tony looked good.

He had showered. He had cut his hair. He had shaved. In the two weeks that had passed since they had seen each other, he had probably had some time gain back some of the lost weight. The bruises were gone, and the cut on his lip was barely visible. The shirt he was wearing, dark red with chess figures patterned on it in black and white, brought out the warm undertones of his freshly tanned skin.

He was looking over Steve with pleased, satisfied surprise.

His wide mahogany desk was in between them. Nothing was happening. Steve willed his heart to slow down, willed his nerves to loosen.

“I wasn’t sure you’d show,” Tony said, standing.

“Yeah, well.” Steve’s eyes lingered a second too long on the designer’s long, dark eyelashes — was he wearing makeup?

Tony slipped out from behind the desk, closing the space between them like it was nothing at all. Steve’s heart doubled its already breakneck pace.

“I wanted to see where you’d hid the files,” he said, abruptly.

“Oh,” Tony didn’t quite sound disappointed, but Steve could tell he’d taken the wind out of his sails, “in here, actually.”

“Here? But we had searched everything. I checked all your papers. I checked underneath the desk, in all the drawers. Hell, I checked for secret compartments in the ceiling, and I know the police would have, too.”

Tony smiled the classic press half-smirk, one corner of his mouth quirking up, and took Steve by the wrist.

“There’s one part of my life that my family has never taken an interest in,” he said, “did you see my dresses?”

Steve nodded, and Tony led him back over to the white dress, the same one that had caught his attention on the first time seeing the office.

He opened up the front of the dress, where the little red spot that could have been a bird or a plane had been sewed in, and, underneath layers of unfinished fabric, revealed a hidden compartment.

“Tiny, flat little drive,” he said, “no one would think the metal detectors would be beeping at anything except the little hooks, here, and the metallic embroidery.”

“Oh,” Steve said.

Tony turned on his heel to face him, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “Was that worth living for, big guy?”

Steve, knowing he was red, said nothing. Tony’s hand hovered over chest, “How’s the bullet wound, by the way?”

“Oh. Better. You can— you can look. If you want to.“

The permission was all that he was waiting for; in a few deft, practiced movements, Tony untied Steve’s tie, tossed it onto the desk, where it knocked over a cup full of colored pens, and went for his buttons. “Still Walmart?”

“They, uh— they come in packs of four.”

“You can think of yourself as a Ken doll,” Tony informed him, “because there’s going to be nothing straight about how much I enjoy dressing you up.”

Steve was sure, now, that his neck must be as red as his face. Tony’s fingers brushed lightly against the cleaned up wound, gentle enough not to hurt. “Needed a lot of stitches, darling?”

“Twenty-one,” Steve said, absurdly grateful to have a straightforward, easy answer to give him.

“You poor dear.” Tony stepped even closer. He smelled, Steve noticed, exactly as the letter had, the same mixture of spice and rosewood,“I know you didn’t want my money. But I could show you my appreciation in other ways, detective.” 

This, Steve knew, was the point to make a decision. His hand was sweaty when he raised it to rest lightly on Tony’s hip, feeling the little upward jut of bone.

“Yeah,” he said, huskily, “alright.”

Tony’s stubble tickled his face when he craned his head up to kiss him. He tasted, just barely, of something alcoholic and slightly sweet. By the time Steve had thought to kiss back, he was already drawing back.

“No, upstairs, upstairs. Five weeks without a bed, I’m never fucking in a chair again.”

Tony nabbed Steve’s tie from the desk, not bothering with his spilled pens, and took him by the wrist, pulling him confidently out of the office.

The security guards look at them impassively when Tony informed him he was turning in for the night. Hyperaware of his still unbuttoned shirt, Steve thought, _they know. Holy shit, they know._

A strange sense of excitement mixed with his guilt and his shame. There was no time to untangle it — Tony was pulling him to the elevator. He pressed the door close button, and turned to Steve once more.

“I’ve got a lot of experience,” he said, “been around.”

Steve blinked, trying to parse out what he meant. “Well, I’m clean. There’s a condom in my wallet.”

Tony reached up, clearly amused, and put a finger on Steve’s lips.

“What I’m trying to say,” he corrected, “is that I think I’ve gotten pretty good at telling what people want.”

The elevator doors opened. Tony wrapped an arm around his waist and whisked him onto the landing. He had to let go to unlock the apartment itself, but Steve felt the afterimage of a touch, still, warm and tingly.

“What do you think I want?” He asked, as Tony opened the door for him.

The apartment was largely unchanged from the last time he had seen it. It had been cleaned up, now mostly uncluttered. The fabric scraps that littered the coffee table looked new. Steve reached over to touch a piece of heavy purple velvet.

“I think,” Tony said, coming up behind him, “that you want a sexy, capable man to show you the ropes. Help you figure out what you like.”

His hand closed around Steve’s wrist. His mouth was on Steve’s neck.

The thought of giving up control, of letting someone else handle it, was so tempting Steve could taste it. Ashamed and thrilled at the same time, he froze up.

“Nothing scary, darling,” Tony said, pulling off Steve’s unbuttoned shirt, “nothing you won’t like. You tell me the word and I’ll stop.”

“Okay,” Steve said, and something unfurled in his gut at the simple word, something he’d been waiting to let go of for what felt like years, “yeah, okay.”

Tony chucked Steve’s shirt carelessly on the floor, hooked a finger in belt loop, and pulled him into the bedroom. It was a big room, with a tall ceiling and a wide bed in a minimalistic, smooth bed frame. The deep scarlet duvet cover looked soft.

Unhurried, Tony folded it out of the way at the foot of the bed, leaving bare sheets behind. He unbuttoned his own shirt and stopped to hang it up in the walk in closet. It was so deep that Steve lost sight of him for a moment, and he waited awkwardly, shifting his weight around. Was something expected of him? Should he be undressing?

When Tony emerged, he was wearing nothing but a bright red, lacy thong. Unable to help himself, Steve stared.

“My eyes are up here, darling,” Tony told him, fondly, unconsciously echoing his ex-fiancée.

Realizing that this was something he could do, Steve reached over and set his hands on Tony’s hips, again. Tony gave a little huff, surprised and pleased, as Steve pulled him in.

His hands, always busy, worked Steve out of his slacks as they kissed. Steve let him herd him back towards the bed in small, shuffling steps. When the back of his knees hit the bed, a light shove from Tony had him tumbling all the way down.

Tony pulled his shoes off and followed him down, straddling his waist.

“How do you feel,” he asked matter of factly, sliding his hand past the waistband of Steve’s boxers, “about lace?”

Steve’s skepticism must have shown on his face.

“That’s alright,” Tony said, casually palming Steve’s half-hard cock, “we’ll find something else for you. Even just a nice pair of briefs would do wonders, something sleek…”

“Oh!” Steve said.

Tony’s hands were soft, and, as he’s promised, very skilled. Steve couldn’t quite focus of his words.

“It’s a tragedy not to tailor,” Tony continued, working Steve’s dick up and down with confident strokes, “With a waist to shoulder ratio like yours. What was that, XL? That’s awful. Here, honey.”

He tapped his fingers lightly against Steve’s mouth. It took Steve a second to realize he was to open, and then, flushing, he did so, sucking lightly on Tony’s fingers.

“Thank you, dear,” Tony said, adjusting the way he was sitting so he could more easily slip the thong off, “that’ll only do much, though, little jar in the bedside drawer, you can go ahead and pass that over.”

He drew his hand back, and Steve watched, mesmerized, as he pushed his wet fingers into himself and pumped. The sheer, unashamed obscenity of the gesture was threatening to push him over the edge already.

“The lube, Rogers,” Tony reminded him.

“Oh.” Feeling a little silly, Steve opened the drawer and passed the aforementioned jar.

“Next time, you’ll be doing the work, here,” Tony told him, slicking up his fingers. Steve could feel himself flushing at the thought that there would be a next time, “but you got shot, poor dear, we’re going easy on you.”

He leaned down, giving Steve a quick, playful peck on the lips. The cold of Tony’s slick fingers on his dick jolted him to attention.

“Can you—“ he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been planning to ask for, and cut himself off.

Tony waited, one eyebrow raised, until it was clear Steve wasn’t going to finish the question. “Here, honey,” he said, again, reaching to take Steve’s hand and put it over his own hard cock, “you give me a hand and I’ll make this very good for you.”

This part, Steve thought, was familiar. He gave Tony a few light strokes, the way he’d to himself, and, gaining confidence, settled into a steady rhythm.

“Oh— mm, there it is,” Tony hummed appreciatively, lining up. Steve’s eyes were fixed on his muscular thighs, deceptively soft to the touch, “you ready darling?”

“Please.”

“ _Please._ See, I like that about you,” Tony said, “Didn’t have to do anything, and you’re already—“

He sank down, slowly, on Steve’s shaft. Steve could see the strain on his face, for a moment, the words lapsing into a concentrated silence. He was hot, and tight, and altogether more than Steve had expected. Involuntarily, his hips twitched up.

Tony stilled him with a hand on his hipbone, shaking his head. “No, let me get adjusted. Give me a little attention, too, I’m feeling horribly neglected.”

“Poor you,” Steve managed, his voice a little strained, returned his hand to Tony’s dick.

“It’s not easy,” Tony informed him. He worked his hips up a little, looking for an angle, and, again, Steve caught the exact moment he found it, the tension in his face giving way to pleasure. “Ah— ah, alright.”

He braced himself with hands on Steve’s hips, and, his thighs shaking slightly with the effort, began to fuck himself in earnest on his cock. The mask he normally wore was off, now — Steve could see every little feeling cross his face, little bursts of pleasure. It was beautifully, overwhelmingly vulgar.

“Hips up,” Tony said, “move with me.”

Steve did so, matching Tony’s rhythm. They were moving in tandem, connected, and, feeling ridiculous about it even as he thought it, Steve felt seen, understood. He wondered what it was that had stopped him before.

Tony did something just then, a slight change of angle, a tightening, and Steve moaned deep in his throat, unable to help himself. He could already feel orgasm approaching, and had the presence of mind to be embarrassed about it.

“Tony, I’m not going to—“ he started.

“I know you’re not going to last,” Tony said, smug, “c’mon, get me off first. Bit of lube on your hand, I don’t want chafing.”

Uncoordinated, Steve fumbled for the jar and slicked up his hand, returning it to Tony.

“Bit faster,” Tony said, and caught himself on an upward, angle movement, “mm, there’s the charm.

Steve couldn’t have stopped himself from rocking up into him now, even if he had wanted to. They bodies moved together, the pace increasing, and increasing, and—

“Ah, fuck,” Tony said softly, oddly anticlimactic. His hands gripped hard at Steve’s hips as he came, his back arching, eyes shut. He tightened on Steve, too, the heat and pressure overwhelming now, and Steve cried out, beyond words, and followed his lead.

For a moment, both of them were frozen, riding out the aftershocks together. Tony came to himself first, and, wrung out, untangled himself from Steve and plopped down heavily next to him on the bed.

Steve reached up to feel at something on his face.

“Oh,” he said, “you came on my chin.”

“I think the words you’re looking for,” Tony’s tone was still smug, and Steve supposed he’d earned the right, “Are, ‘thank you, Tony, that was wonderful. I’ll never be able to sleep with anyone else again.’”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve wiped at his chin with the back of his hand. Having caught his breath, Tony caught him by the wrist and pulled him up towards the shower.

Steve wasn’t sure if he was meant to stay the night, but it was Tony’s hand on his, again, that pulled him back to the bed after they had rinsed off.

“You’re contractually obligated to be big spoon,” Tony told him, “it’s just manners.”

“Alright,” Steve said, slightly amused, and let Tony arrange him as he saw fit. The designer tucked himself neatly against the hard lines of Steve’s body, and Steve wrapped an arm snugly around his waist.

“Were you serious,” he asked some ten minutes later, when he was sure Tony must only be half awake, “about next time?”

“Oh, darling,” Tony turned to face him, sleepy and content with an air of the same satisfied smug, “I’ve got my claws in you, now. I’m not planning to let go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and there it is!! thank you do much to everyone who's been reading along and has stuck with it until now!! i hope you've enjoyed. ^-^


End file.
